Onslaught Is an Action Movie for Today’s America
Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s bullet-riddled John Carpenter homage gets its kicks from gun fetishism and conspiracy theories.
Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett are not shy about using conspiracy theories in their movies. Even in the very mainstream and relatively family-friendly Godzilla franchise, the creative duo (Wingard directs, and Barrett writes) incorporates imagery and themes that, for better or for worse, mark them as products of a decade where paranoid thought became mainstream. This was a little more awkward during the height of QAnon, but in 2026, the proverbial cow has wandered so far out of the barn of objective truth that you might as well cut the thing in half with a machine gun and make hamburgers. Enter Onslaught.
Wingard backed out of Godzilla X Kong: Supernova for this low-budget action flick, and the director’s relief at getting back to bullet-riddled basics is palpable. A few actors familiar from Wingard’s franchise work appear in Onslaught, also liberated by the pulp excess of the material: Dan Stevens is here, of course, doing his silly-accent thing as a German scientist one character refers to as “third-generation Paperclip” (a reference to Operation Paperclip, the once-secret program that brought thousands of ex-Nazis to America to work on U.S. aerospace technology). Rebecca Hall is here too, going a little broader than usual as the mad doctor’s dominatrix wife/handler.
Dan Stevens camps it up in his latest collaboration with Adam Wingard.
Onslaught spends its first half setting up the circumstances that lead to its second, an extended action sequence that pits the residents of a desert trailer park against the genetically engineered super-soldiers Dr. Kammler (Stevens) has devoted his life to creating. Given that Barrett’s script pulls from the past 80 years of U.S. government malfeasance, imagery of troops indiscriminately slaughtering civilians could uncomfortably evoke war crimes committed by our military in Vietnam, or Iraq, or any number of “conflicts” over the past few decades. And it does, but just enough to give the movie a ‘70s-style anti-authoritarian edge.
Specifically, Onslaught recalls the style of vintage John Carpenter movies, and even more specifically the pulp-action maestro’s 1976 shocker Assault on Precinct 13. Like that film, it alludes to current events without overplaying the connection, instead emphasizing the tough-guy (and gal) camaraderie between its working-class characters. Here, the defense against the hulking, glowing-eyed undead is led by Celeste (Adria Arjona), an Army veteran whose approach to coping with PTSD involves lots of heavy ammunition. (She’s introduced blasting a line of jack o’ lanterns, a nod to Wingard and Barrett’s other super-soldier action movie, 2014’s The Guest.)
The supersoldiers are capital “E” evil.
Many of Celeste’s neighbors are veterans, too, including Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), who’s concerned about Celeste’s mental health but knows better than to push her too hard. Like Celeste, most of them are also divorced, like Kovacks (Eric Wareheim), an idiot cop who provides the comic relief when Stevens’ character isn’t on screen. Celeste’s young daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) is also visiting her on the weekend when the super-soldiers break containment, and the outrageous levels of peril this kid is placed into throughout the last half-hour of Onslaught are also undeniably edgy.
No spoilers on whether Wingard and Barrett are audacious enough to actually kill a child on screen (as famously happens in Assault on Precinct 13). But a mass shooting at a gas station is another moment where this film’s slick, giddy violence tiptoes right up to the edge of distasteful, only to slip on a puddle of blue slushy and juicy red squibs. It’s not like there’s much time to meditate on the futility of violence, anyway: Onslaught flies by at a compact 92 minutes, with a literal ticking clock and pacing so breathless that even the setup feels exciting.
Arjona capably carries this wild, excessive action movie.
The super-soldiers — all played by action veterans and MMA fighters — are all more like slasher villains than real people, and any lingering sympathy we might have for them is erased by the reveal that these guys were really into extrajudicial murder before all the Nazi experimentation. Besides, good and evil is not the point — thrills and sensation are. Everything is pushed to its limit here: The strippers dress in latex nun habits. Celeste has a rocket launcher in her gun safe. The CIA agent who provides much of the narrative exposition is high on MDMA the entire movie. If nothing else, Onslaught is an exercise in excess — something we Americans do exceptionally well.
