As I sat in the dark abyss of my local movie theater, enveloped in brutally comprehensive sound design and staring at these filmic and deeply tactile frames of Adria Arjona’s face, I was profoundly moved. It wasn’t more than a few minutes into the runtime of Adam Wingard’s Onslaught that I began to allow myself to ponder if this could in fact prove to be the filmmaker’s greatest achievement to date. And can you really fault me for allowing such indulgences? This is a film that opens with John Carpenter font, a cold open of Arjona’s character shooting jack-o'-lanterns for target practice in the desert, and some playful vintage bass synth lines, before smash-cutting to the opening title card over the image of a pumpkin exploding and blaring a musical stinger pulled directly from Halloween III: Season of the Witch; this is distinctly my shit.
And that persisted well into the film’s overall curvature, as I found myself being endlessly delighted by nearly every element at play within the first act-and-a-half of this go-for-broke horror-thriller that feels as if it clawed its way directly out of the deep recesses of Wingard’s mind and splattered directly onto the celluloid. Unfortunately though, the film is unable to sustain this momentum and sheer level of stakes-raising lunacy for the whole of its runtime. It winds up falling into a repetitive rut for the final stretch that makes the whole thing feel less than satisfying. But good Lord, was that first half killer.
One of the greatest strengths of Onslaught is the sheer prowess and confidence with which Wingard and his creative team are operating here. If you’re unfamiliar with Wingard as a filmmaker, he is the man behind low-budget horror cult classics such as You’re Next and The Guest, but he also made the leap to big-budget blockbusters with aplomb with Godzilla vs. Kong. After spending years away helping to chart the trajectory of those MonsterVerse crossovers, Onslaught is his first at-bat back in his initial genre of choice, and it manages to feel both like a celebratory homecoming and nothing short of a strutting-his-shit moment.
From the very opening of the film, everything about Onslaught plays as Wingard getting to do whatever he wants, however he wants, wherever he wants. Whereas films like You’re Next or The Guest often had to make the most with the least given their modest budgetary constraints, that is clearly not much of an issue on this A24 production. Wingard is operating with a much greater cache of resources and has insight into how to apply them in fascinating ways thanks to his time working on these gargantuan-scaled blockbusters. The result is that Wingard is at the absolute peak of his abilities here, with he and DP Oren Soffer creating pulpy and profoundly compelling imagery that often feels as if it was pulled directly from the cover of a beat-up old paperback horror novel.
This confidence and unchecked audaciousness infiltrates every level of the craft here, from Wingard and longtime collaborator Simon Barrett’s tonally off-the-wall script to Tom Hammock’s intricate and stylized production design to Josh Schaeffer and Adam Avery’s didactic editing to Jason W. Jennings’ tangible and oft-invasive sound design to Matt Pusti's propulsive synth distortion musical score, and it all absolutely rules. On top of that, the performances are really solid throughout, with the aforementioned Arjona, Reginald VelJohnson, and Wingard-regulars Dan Stevens and Rebecca Hall serving as massive standouts. I also really liked Michael Biehn’s brief but memorable bit, as well as Drew Starkey and Alex Perieira getting wildly different antagonistic performances.
But to illustrate just how in-his-element Wingard is here in the early stretch, the introductory scene for Stevens and Hall’s married couple sees the former in extensive old-man prosthetics doing some unsavory things to the latter’s feet shortly after she debuts an accent that can only be described as extremely evocative of Teri Garr in Young Frankenstein, right down to the intonations of the “heir doctor” opening line. Pair this with later sequences, like Starkey’s secret operative being pulled out of a brothel after ingesting MDNA and having to spend the rest of his storyline inexplicably tripping, or the potent interweaving of suspense and white-knuckled violence in the gas station massacre, and it could not be more clear that Wingard is letting his freak flag fully fly with this movie.
Everything about the first act just works so well, forming this ever-escalating structure rooted in the exploration, subversion, and ultimate exploitation of classic slasher tropes. Wingard’s idea to insert literal ticking-clock intertitles (in the John Carpenter font and all) is a great idea that winds the screws that much tighter, and continuously builds anticipation as Barrett’s script familiarizes the audience with the cast of characters within this trailer park, the geography, and the unstoppable threat of this trio of murder-hungry super soldiers who are on route.
Straight up, if you had stopped this film just as the antagonists arrive at the trailer park and asked me what grade I was going to give it, the answer is an A, easy. Unfortunately, the movie winds up not quite having the follow-through that you would hope it would. While the solders’ initial attack on the trailer park is thrilling and captured with vigor and intensity to spare, it doesn’t feel like it fully capitalizes on the elements that Wingard and Barrett have so intently been establishing throughout the early sections of the film. Things feel a bit more slapdash here, and it only grows more disappointing when the bulk of the film's narrative just kind of stalls out as characters spend the final act going from one trailer to the next, repeating many of the same beats multiple times, before a final showdown that is undeniably entertaining, but still feels as if it doesn’t quite capitalize on the potential that was inherently baked into this thing at the start.
GRADE: B-
Ultimately, Onslaught is half of the greatest movie Adam Wingard has ever made and half of a much more mortal action-thriller. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it; I absolutely did. I am genuinely of the opinion that Dan Stevens should get an Academy Award nomination for how far out on a limb he goes here, committing an insane degree to some genuine sicko shit. But for as much as I was totally enveloped by the first half of the film, it was difficult to not feel increasing levels of dissonance in the film’s latter sections, as if it was falling short of the glory those initial reels promised.
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