Sometimes a movie knows exactly what it wants to be, embraces it completely and never apologizes for the carnage that follows.
Onslaught is that kind of movie.
Director Adam Wingard returns to the smaller-scale genre filmmaking that helped establish his career, delivering a violent, stylish and wonderfully unhinged action-horror throwback that feels ripped from another era and injected with modern filmmaking muscle.
It’s loud. It’s bloody. It’s ridiculous in all the right ways.
And most importantly, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Adria Arjona stars as Celeste, a former Army sniper living with her daughter when a squad of genetically engineered super soldiers escapes from a secret military facility. What begins as a relatively contained survival story quickly becomes something much nastier as Celeste is forced to rely on the skills she thought she’d left behind.
Arjona absolutely owns the movie.
There’s a physicality to her performance that makes Celeste believable as someone capable of surviving the insanity Wingard throws at her, but Arjona also gives the character enough vulnerability to keep Onslaught from becoming nothing more than an exercise in bloodshed.
The movie surrounds her with an appropriately bizarre ensemble that includes Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim, Reginald VelJohnson, Michael Biehn, Drew Starkey, Rebecca Hall and UFC fighter Alex Pereira as the imposing Butcher.
Stevens, in particular, seems perfectly at home in Wingard’s twisted world. Anyone who remembers what the actor and director accomplished together with The Guest knows just how entertaining that combination can be.
But Onslaught ultimately belongs to Arjona.
Onslaught [A24]
Once the movie unleashes her, Celeste becomes the type of action hero genre fans rarely get anymore. She’s tough without becoming invincible, vulnerable without being helpless and completely convincing when it’s time to fight back.
Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett aren’t trying to reinvent the action-horror genre here. They’re playing with the toys that made it fun in the first place.
There are shades of The Terminator, old-school siege movies, slashers and the grimy grindhouse films that clearly helped inspire the filmmakers. Early reviews have similarly pointed toward the movie’s throwback influences, with critics describing it as a gory action-slasher and a love letter to grindhouse filmmaking.
That’s part of its charm.
Onslaught isn’t interested in sanding down its edges. The violence is nasty, the humor is dark and Wingard lets the movie get increasingly strange as the bodies begin piling up.
At just 92 minutes, it also doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Onslaught [A24]
There are moments when the buildup takes longer than expected, and viewers expecting nonstop action from the opening scene may be surprised by how deliberately Wingard sets the pieces in place. That’s also been the biggest criticism among some early reviews, which argue that the film takes too long to fully unleash its premise.
But when Onslaught finally lets loose, it delivers exactly the kind of blood-soaked genre chaos it promises.
This isn’t prestige filmmaking pretending to be a B-movie.
It’s a B-movie made by filmmakers who clearly love B-movies.
And there’s something refreshing about that.
Wingard gives audiences a nasty little action-horror movie built for the big screen, while Arjona proves she is more than capable of carrying an action franchise on her shoulders.
Onslaught is violent, weird, stylish and unapologetically excessive.
In other words, exactly what it should be.
“A bloody, brutal blast from start to finish.”
Onslaught hits theaters September 4 from A24
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