Some moviegoers may know director Adam Wingard from his blockbuster projects Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire. For others, their introduction to Wingard is 2011’s surprise horror hit You’re Next – you can’t hear Looking for the Magic by Dwight Twilley Band and not think of You’re Next.  He’s also one of the directors in the V/H/S horror film series, and the gritty action thriller The Guest.  

Wingard’s latest film is Onslaught. The aptly titled film is more gritty action thriller than blockbuster action movie.  

Onslaught follows Celeste (Adria Arjona), a retired army sniper living in a desert trailer park. She now makes her living as a landlord for the trailer park.  Through unforeseen circumstances, Celeste is caring for her young daughter for a few days while her ex leaves town for work.  

Meanwhile, at a secret military base near the trailer park, Dr. Kammier (Dan Stevens) is testing a group of genetically modified super soldiers. The trio of super soldiers have a special set of skills, and they’re led by a menacing figure known as The Butcher (Alex Pereira). After the trio escapes, they make their way down the road and kill every person in sight. Imagine Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers, with military training, unleashed on a community of people – that describes what the super soldiers are doing.  

Celeste’s trailer park is in the path of the soldier’s destruction. Along with help from her neighbors Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) and Kovacks (Eric Wareheim), Celeste must protect her daughter and the community she loves.  

With a runtime of 92 minutes, Onslaught is a lean action thriller that gets to the point. There aren’t any wasted moments in this film. Once the action starts, the film goes from one heart pounding situation to the next.  Wingard drops his main character right in the middle of a horror movie and doesn’t allow the audience a lot of time to breathe. He does a great job of making the audience feel like they’re trapped in the trailer park with Celeste.  

One of Wingard’s greatest gifts is his ability to shoot horror scenes. He knows when to pull away and when to crank up the horror.  If you think of this film as a multi-layered cake – the cake is a military action thriller with layers of horror in between.  There are scenes with the soldiers shot as hulking shadowy figures with hatchets and chainsaws that look like something out of a horror film. One of the soldiers chased someone with a chainsaw, and it could easily be a scene from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When Celeste’s daughter is being hunted, it feels like a chase sequence from a slasher. 

Onslaught doesn’t pretend to be anything but a 90-minute thrill ride packed full of tropes. The tropes in the film feel like a wink to the films that inspired Onslaught and its creators more than having tropes to fill in the runtime or patch up plot holes. There aren’t any memorable characters, quotable lines, or sequences that take your breath away. It’s a film about a woman using her skills to fight of a gang of merciless killers. We’ve seen this trope all the way back to the Spaghetti Western days of film.   

The film left me wanting two things. Adam Wingard should make more weird thrillers with oddball characters. Adria Ajorna has potential to be a star and an even bigger star if she’s given an action franchise (maybe Wonder Woman in James Gunn’s DCU).  

Onslaught is a gruesome action thriller that never lets up once the killing starts. It’s fun, funny, over-the-top, and a bloody good time.  

Grade: B