The Guest wasn’t just Godzilla vs. Kong director Adam Wingard’s best film. It was an ‘80s-cinema throwback that, eschewing homage-y kitsch, authentically channeled the era’s particular brand of sleazy, sadistic, silly madness.
Now, Wingard has delivered a kindred-spirit splatterfest of epically badass proportions—with an unforgettable performance at its center.
Onslaught (September 4, in theaters) doesn’t reference 2014’s The Guest, and it features that predecessor’s star, Dan Stevens, in a completely different role. Yet given that its tale also concerns ex-army members, covert government programs on servicemen, and an avalanche of carnage, it’s clear that the two exist in the same universe—a bond strengthened by the pair’s shared affinity for all-out violent mayhem, which in this case revolves around a PTSD-afflicted single mother played, in an awesomely rugged and commanding performance, by Andor star Adria Arjona.
Onslaught opens to the sound of thunderous gunshots, all of them fired by Celeste (Arjona) at a collection of jack o’ lanterns lined up for target practice in the middle of the desert. Celeste manages a dusty trailer park whose residents include friendly Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) and rent-deficient cop Kovacks (Eric Wareheim).
When she’s not shooting her weapons, the lonely woman is cleaning them in her unkempt home, whose walls are decorated with medals and photographs that are directly related to the wartime flashbacks (spied in slow-motion black-and-white fragments) that plague her damaged mind.
As Celeste tends to her nondescript domicile, German scientist Dr. Hans Kammler (Stevens)—a bald weirdo who has one milky eye and wears an all-white suit and matching cape—licks the high-heeled shoe of his wife Hanna (Rebecca Hall) before being spirited away by helicopter, blindfolded, to an Area 51-esque subterranean research facility.
There, he’s transforming a trio of the worst that the U.S. Armed Forces has to offer into super soldiers programmed to kill without hesitation or conscience. Decked out in heavy gear, their faces covered by dark masks and paint to make their glowing eyes stand out, they’re a silent and deadly threesome, and during a drill, they prove to Kammler and military envoy Baylor (Michael Biehn) that they’re scarily ready for duty.
Like The Guest, Onslaught utilizes an old-school synth score judiciously, thereby maximizing its ominous effectiveness. Just as evocatively, it often shows its marauders in silhouette, standing side by side in the moonlight amid heavy fog. Once they’ve broken free of their confines, these brutes head out into the great wide open in search of additional targets.
This compels the military to enlist the services of Cyrus (Drew Starkey), a mysterious fixer who must halt his evening at a BDSM club to clean up the mounting mess. Unfortunately for him, there’s a lot of it, since as he learns from Hanna, these super soldiers—led by a fiend known as The Butcher (Alex Pereira)—have been trained to slaughter their fellow countrymen, and with an ensuing truck stop massacre, they demonstrate their robotic mercilessness.
Collaborating with frequent screenwriter partner Simon Barrett, Wingard melds bits and pieces of Assault on Precinct 13, The Terminator, Universal Soldier, Aliens, and any number of similar efforts (including the cheapo knockoffs produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus) to construct Onslaught.
The film’s every element feels borrowed from somewhere else, be it evil Nazi scientists secretly working with America, Celeste’s battlefield scars, or the heroine’s squabble with her ready-to-relocate ex-husband over their daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy), who’s unexpectedly dropped in her lap right before the super soldiers descend. It’s a hodgepodge of everything genre fans adore, and consequently, its casting of Die Hard’s VelJohnson and The Terminator’s Biehn feels less wink-wink cutesy than fittingly reverential.
Wingard shoots his balls-to-the-wall sci-fi actioner with requisite visual flair; a shot alongside a semi’s spiked wheel which gazes back at the vehicle and a super soldier standing against the passenger door is especially striking. Nonetheless, he doesn’t make himself the main attraction, instead foregrounding Celeste as she copes with her trauma and attempts to undo some of the parenting done to Daisy by the girl’s dad.
Arjona—who is set to co-star with Oscar winner Michael B. Jordan in next year’s Thomas Crown Affair remake—is an actress who’s equally comfortable and convincing playing steely fighters and damaged souls. And her turn in Onslaught is superb precisely because it isn’t confined to one kill-‘em-all register.
Whether she’s encouraging her overly “formal” daughter to not call her ma’am and to eat a burrito with her hands, or she’s trading jibes with Josiah, she resonates as real—or, at least, as real as such over-the-top, archetype-loving ventures allow.
To build anticipation, Onslaught breaks up its early going with text cards indicating the time and a countdown clock, and when the latter reaches zero, the film indulges in considerable gore. Firearms are a prime facet of Wingard’s latest, and by its conclusion, its baddies additionally get their hands on a giant meat cleaver and a chainsaw that would make Leatherface green with envy.
The director understands that his premise demands extreme bloodshed, and it ultimately arrives in great, gushing geysers, splashing everything nearby, not least the harried visage of Celeste, who loses an eye during the trailer park residents’ nocturnal last stand against the invaders.
Having gone blockbuster big with his two Monsterverse installments, Wingard returns to his roots with Onslaught, and the result is a film brimming with passion for the sensational and seedy B-movies of his youth.
As with James Cameron’s finest from that period, he benefits from a standout female headliner; for all its style and efficiency, the material only works because Arjona is at once tough and vulnerable, unrelenting and wounded, ruthless and sensitive.
On the heels of her stellar contributions to Andor, Hit Man, and Splitsville, she reconfirms with this lean, mean affair that she’s keenly adept at interjecting genuine heart into extravagant sagas.
The sort of film that, decades ago, would have been an ideal Friday night movie (whether seen with a date in theaters or with friends at home on VHS), Onslaught reminds us that the old ways still have plenty of life left in them.
