Matt Konopka reviews ‘Onslaught’, an inconsistent yet entertaining super soldier shocker locked and loaded with John Carpenter vibes.
You could call me a fan of Adam Wingard’s The Guest. I revisit the high-octane, Halloween-set thriller every October. Punk Maika Monroe (It Follows) versus charming yet sadistic super soldier Dan Stevens (Abigail)? I’ll take that any day. Set in the same universe, Onslaught had me giddy. Foaming at the mouth, even. Well, it may not be on the same level, but Onslaught succeeds as The Guest’s inconsistent yet creepy cousin.
Penned by frequent collaborator Simon Barrett, Onslaught drops audiences into a small, desert town. There, we meet Celeste (Adria Arjona), a vet suffering from PTSD who spends her mornings using Jack-o’-lanterns for target practice (because why not?). The property manager of a dusty trailer park, she’s found comfort in isolation, safe from danger. Meanwhile, at a nearby base, Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) conducts experiments with a trio of super soldiers designed to kill without remorse. When the silent killers escape, the government sees it as an opportunity for a test run to see how they do against civilians. Soon, they arrive at Celeste’s home. But they’re about to learn they just messed with the wrong trailer park.
With Onslaught, Wingard dons his best John Carpenter cosplay. He blends The Fog with The Terminator and a dash of Halloween to unleash an atmospheric action horror movie. In the first twenty minutes or so, Onslaught announces itself as a gory thrill ride in the vein of The Guest, but with a B-movie vibe. And it works…to an extent.
Set to Matthew Pusti’s banger riff on Carpenter’s Halloween score, we find Celeste smashing pumpkins with a host of firearms. Bullets roar. Jack-o’-lantern faces explode. And Arjona puts on a furious face contorted by rage coursing through her body. She’s Sarah Connor in T2, serious anger problem and all. The film would have you believe she’s afraid of the outside world, but that’s difficult to imagine considering Celeste takes zero shit from anyone, including her ex, who randomly dumps her daughter off after threatening to move her away. Shoutout to the kid, Daisy (), who spends the film dressed like Wendy Torrance and cracking adorable one-liners.
Blake Kennedy
Then we meet Dan Stevens’ Doctor Kammler (unrelated to his character from The Guest, as far as I could tell). Bad bald cap aside, the white-haired, one-eyed Nazi looks like he stepped right out of a Bond film. He’s an eccentric weirdo, too, who promptly crawls on hands and knees to lick the feet of his wife, Hanna (played by a terribly underutilized Rebecca Hall).
Onslaught feels like the most John Carpenter film that Carpenter never made. The Fog, Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, even Escape from LA. They’re all referenced here, exemplified by the film’s heavily stylized, over-the-top tone and eerie atmospherics. It especially carries that Escape from LA silly action-movie vibe upon meeting the trio of super soldiers for the first time. Baylor (Michael Biehn) arrives to inform Hans that they test the subjects immediately, whether they’re ready or not. To differentiate them for the audience, they’re given ridiculous names based on their backgrounds like Crybaby, The Cockroach, and The Butcher. Then, in a total contradiction of that outrageous tone, the trio puts on a brutal display of their killer instincts, wiping out Baylor’s squadron of armed soldiers in a matter of seconds, before escaping and leaving a trail of bodies behind.
Whereas Stevens’ character from The Guest was a charming psychopath, the silent husks at the center of Onslaught are anything but. We watch the glowy-eyed maniacs rip through trained soldiers and decimate an entire military base. They slaughter a gas-station full of civilians with ease. Screams fill the soundtrack. Gallons of blood wash over the screen. Through it all, the genetically engineered Michael Myers clones decked out in camouflage gear are quick, ruthless, and goddamn unstoppable. They don’t speak. They don’t reason. These men just kill, and kill, and kill.
It’s when Wingard’s super soldiers do what they do best that the film is at its scariest. The gas station scene, for example, gutted me like a pumpkin. The civilians have no chance as they’re brutally massacred in a matter of seconds. It’s a graphic and shocking commentary on the terror of unleashing heavily armed soldiers on ordinary citizens. That horror strikes at the heart of the state of America, where we have unaccountable forces roaming the streets murdering innocent people. Wingard puts a mirror up to that reality and asks, “Is this really who we want to fucking be?” In those moments, Onslaught makes for a difficult yet necessary watch, if only for us to remember: hell no, it’s not.
That frustration with our current environment is further emphasized by how Onslaught reminds viewers that our government is, well, useless when we need them. The film incorporates a sub-plot with an agent named Cyrus (Drew Starkey) tasked with hunting down the super soldiers. He’s our Dr. Loomis. Except, unlike Loomis, he doesn’t do anything but visit scenes of aftermath and shrug. He’s presented as not having a conscience (but also, he does?). Oh, and we meet him at a BDSM club, doped up and high out of his mind (as he is most of the movie). Between him and Hans, that’s either Wingard’s way of saying the government is full of pervs, or an attempt to be edgy. I lean toward the latter.
Despite all that, there’s some inconsistency with the super soldiers that doesn’t always blend well. In an effort to replicate the atmospherics of Halloween and The Fog, the film dramatically slows down once the soldiers arrive at the trailer park. Somehow thwarted by a trailer they just can’t seem to break into, they stand around like Carpenter’s most iconic fiends. Mist fills the air. Their genetically altered eyes glow. Heavy breathing fills the soundtrack. They watch. And watch. And watch. Until Wingard stretches the believability of it to the breaking point. It’s like if Michael Myers just decided to break out running occasionally, leaving you to wonder why he doesn’t do it in the first place. Stalkers are going to stalk, I guess.
For a movie titled Onslaught, there are a lot fewer exciting set pieces than you might expect. Somehow, this trio of zombie-not-zombies soldiers manages to cause less chaos than Stevens in The Guest.
Too often, Onslaught struck me as an imitation of other titles without much understanding of why those movies work. The film wants to be a quiet, atmospheric slasher, but also a pulse-pounding action vehicle. It wants to shock us by touching on the horrific issue of setting soldiers on civilians but then undercuts that by playing everything with an over-the-top weirdness. It wants to tackle issues of PTSD and then gives us a character whose arc seems to be, “learns to kick ass with guns again”.
Look, there’s a lot to like about Onslaught. It’s weird, and fun, and will have Carpenter fans nostalgic for the movies that Wingard so lovingly homages here. But those slow, creeping stylistic choices tend to run against the grain of the story the filmmaker wants to tell. That makes for a frustrating experience if you’re unable to buy into it. Still, from the Carpenter-esque tone to showers of gore and an unsettling commentary that hits all too close to home, Onslaught makes an entertaining case for more films set in the universe of The Guest.
Onslaught blasts into theaters on September 4th via A24.
