It is a truth universally acknowledged that no matter how many films there are about a small band of people being killed by a bad thing in a remote location, there always seems to be room for another one. In the case of Onslaught, the new film from production company A24 and director Adam Wingard, the big evil is three Nazi-engineered super soldiers with beady little eyes. The protagonist, Celeste (Adria Arjona) is an ex-military sniper and dirtbag mom with PTSD. The PTSD is played by repetitive footage of slow-motion explosions. There’s not a whole lot more going on than that, and plot is not what audiences typically demand of such films.
Still, in a recent interview with actor Michael Biehn, Wingard describes Onslaught as a passion project and “the most accurate depiction of what I think the government’s really like.”
Wingard broke into Hollywood with a series of relatively low-budget horror films (the 2011 You’re Next and 2014 The Guest). As is the trend these days, he was rewarded with work in the mines of other people’s intellectual property, most notably the Legendary Warner Bros. private equity-backed Monsterverse, where Wingard was hired to direct Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024), a bargain that expanded his project budgets from a few million to over 100 million.
“You try to make it your own, but really it’s never fully your own because it comes from somebody else’s thoughts,” Wingard continued. To console himself, Wingard characterized King Kong as Elvis in his later years, to the point where he managed to get a “Loving Arms” needle drop into Godzilla vs. Kong.
With the presumed freedom of a passion project firmly in place, you may ask: Is Onslaught good? Depends on what you’re looking for. Arjona puts real verve into shouting lines like “Momma needs to get her guns”—even if she doesn’t bring the unhinged ferocity of Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor or the grim “I just showed up to do my job that I’m good at, and this company keeps fucking with me” relatability that Sigourney Weaver gave to Lt. Ellen Ripley.
Onslaught looks incredible. Production designer Tom Hammock (Godzilla x Kong, but also 2025’s Weapons) has stocked it with nearly every ’70s and ’80s midnight movie trope, styled to the nth degree. It’s a smorgasbord of trucks, bunkers, boobs, butts, foot-licking, chainsaws, arterial jets of well-lit blood, black vinyl fetish gear barely covering waxed genitalia, Nazis, and exactly one woman (Arjona) wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit, because strong women wear jumpsuits.
Wingard achieves the vibe of a mid-sized studio picture, but with the incoherence of an early-career feature. There are entire scenes and characters that feel spliced in from completely different movies, like the ample screen time given to a guy with a Eurotrash haircut and suit with skinny lapels, who is supposedly on MDMA but never stops to pet anything.
At times, Onslaught feels like talking like talking to someone at a party and gradually realizing that they have just gotten out of a long-term relationship. In some ways, they are a full-grown adult person. In others, they’ve rebooted to what they were before they partnered up.
This left me unexpectedly nostalgic for New World Pictures, the low budget movie factory run by Roger Corman in the ’70s, which produced hundreds of films fit for drive-in movie theaters. James Cameron worked there, as did nearly every other filmmaker Wingard cites as inspiration. Budgets and stakes were low, mistakes were frequent, and the pace of production was relentless. What a luxury it is, now, to be able to fail that often and that early.
Onslaught opens in wide release Sept 4, 92 minutes, rated R.
