Adam Wingard’s Onslaught runs 92 minutes and spends most of them making a case that the scariest thing in the desert is a soldier who has learned to stop his own heart. The film is an action horror picture from A24, written by Simon Barrett and Wingard, and it shares a continuity with The Guest. It is lean, mean and occasionally brilliant, and it never quite solves the problem of a villain squad that is more interesting than the woman hunting it.
Adria Arjona plays Celeste Cross, a former Army sniper who manages a trailer park near the facility in New Mexico. When her ex-husband Griffin drops off their daughter Daisy, the film has its stakes: one mother, one child, one night, and three escapees walking toward them.
Trailer, via A24.
Hans Kammler’s facility and the Crybaby, Cockroach and Butcher
The opening is the best stretch of Onslaught. Dan Stevens plays Dr. Hans Kammler, a Nazi scientist running a U.S. government program to build super soldiers. Three subjects — Crybaby, Cockroach and the Butcher — were chosen from military personnel for one quality above all: a demonstrated ability to survive and kill without mercy.
Surgery and conditioning gave them enhanced strength, endurance, durability, muscular control and night-vision, plus a relentless drive to kill. In a test exercise, regular soldiers are sent in as fodder. All three subjects appear to die of cardiac arrest. They have not. They have exerted conscious control over their heart rate to fake death and lure their supervisors into the arena.
Then they kill everyone. Hans, government agent Baylor, Baylor’s men. The sequence lands because the trick is cruel and simple, and because the film has spent its first act making the squad feel like a procedure rather than a monster.
A trailer park, a bedtime story and a grudge
Celeste’s world is smaller and better drawn. Griffin leaves Daisy with her after being called away on short notice. That night, Celeste comforts the girl with a story from her Army days, when a fellow soldier challenged her to a fight because he thought she looked like an easy target.
She won by kicking him in the testicles, fast and humiliating. That soldier became the Butcher. It is the cleanest piece of writing in Onslaught — a mother’s bedtime story that doubles as a threat assessment — and it does more for the film’s tension than any of its set pieces.
Then the squad hits a truck stop near the park, kills everyone inside, steals a truck and drives toward Celeste. The film has now told you exactly what is coming and exactly why it is personal.
What each fighter brings to the desert
| Character | Actor | Role | What they bring |
|---|---|---|---|
| Celeste Cross | Adria Arjona | Former Army sniper | Precision, a mother’s refusal to retreat |
| The Butcher | Alex Pereira | Super soldier | Grudge against Celeste, martial arts background |
| Cyrus | Drew Starkey | Government cleaner | Containment orders, no loyalty to the park |
| Hans Kammler | Dan Stevens | Nazi scientist | Created the squad, dies in its escape |
| Hanna Kammler | Rebecca Hall | Wife and collaborator | Takes control, contacts Cyrus |
| Baylor | Michael Biehn | Government agent | Reviews Hans’ work, dies in the arena |
The table is also the film’s central problem. Every column on the right is a promise, and Onslaught only keeps about half of them.
Cyrus and Hanna Kammler
Rebecca Hall’s Hanna Kammler, Hans’ wife and collaborator, assumes control of the program after the escape and contacts Cyrus, a cleaner deployed by his superiors to contain the situation. That is a strong second-act engine: the people who built the weapon now have to scrub it, and they are not sentimental about who lives in the scrub zone.
But the machinery around Cyrus and Hanna is thinner than the trailer park. Cyrus is a function, not a person. Hanna gets a phone and a purpose and not much else. The film’s real subject — a woman who already survived one war being asked to survive another with a child in the next room — is the part that holds.
Wingard and Barrett know how to stage violence. The 92-minute runtime is a virtue; nothing here dawdles, and the truck stop massacre lands with the blunt, ugly speed the premise demands. The escape from the arena is the standout, a sequence that earns its place by being the film’s first real shock.
Reginald VelJohnson, Eric Wareheim and the neighbors
The supporting cast is where Onslaught gets its texture. Eric Wareheim plays Kovacks, a police officer and Celeste’s neighbor. Reginald VelJohnson plays Josiah, a Vietnam veteran next door. Michael Biehn’s Baylor is a government man who reviews Hans’ work and pays for it in the arena.
Biehn’s presence is the film’s sharpest piece of casting, and it is not nostalgia for its own sake. He plays a man who reviews the program and recognizes, too late, that he is standing inside it. VelJohnson and Wareheim give the trailer park a life worth defending, which is the only reason the last act has anything at stake.
Blake Kennedy’s Daisy is a child in a horror film, which is a hard job, and the film uses her sparingly. Jacob Scipio plays Griffin, Leon M. Brown plays Larkin, Dave Campbell is the Cockroach, Tyler Hall is the Crybaby, and Maurice Greene is Teddy. Alex Pereira’s Butcher is the one the film trusts to carry a grudge, and he does it with his shoulders.
Where Onslaught leaves its best weapon
Here is the part worth arguing about. Onslaught has a genuinely good idea — the enemy that can fake death, that has to be verified twice, that turns every corpse into a decision — and it spends that idea in the first twenty minutes. After the arena, the squad becomes a standard-issue pursuit force. Enhanced strength and night-vision are advantages, not dread.
That is a waste, and it is the difference between a very good genre film and a great one. The Guest comparison does Onslaught no favors either; sharing a continuity invites a measurement the film does not win.
What does win is Arjona. She plays Celeste without a shred of vanity, and the film’s best moments are the quiet ones — a mother telling a story she has told before, choosing which parts to leave out. When the violence arrives, it reads as competence rather than spectacle, and that is a harder thing to build than any super soldier.
The film’s box office is a separate matter from its quality. Onslaught grossed $3.1 million against a $15 million budget, a disappointment by any measure, and it opened to mixed reviews. Neither figure changes what is on screen. What is on screen is a tight, well-cast, occasionally inspired B-picture with one great monster mechanic it does not know how to keep using.
If you are deciding whether this is worth your night, here is the order that matters:
- The arena escape. The film’s best sequence and its best idea, and the first real shock.
- Celeste’s bedtime story about the soldier she humiliated. The cleanest writing in the picture.
- The truck stop massacre. Ugly, fast, and exactly what the premise promises.
- Arjona’s quiet scenes with Daisy. Competence rather than spectacle, and the film is better for it.
- The Cyrus and Hanna material. Necessary machinery, thin as paper.
The verdict on Onslaught
Onslaught is worth 92 minutes of anyone’s time, and it is worth more than that for the first act alone. It is a film with a clear voice, a real star turn and a premise that could carry a franchise if the franchise remembers what made the premise frightening. The Butcher’s grudge, Celeste’s bedtime story, the arena trick — those are the parts that last. Cyrus and the containment thread are the parts that evaporate.
A24 has a lean, mean action horror film here, and it is better than its receipts suggest. It is also a warning about what happens when a movie builds a monster it cannot afford to keep feeding.
7 of 10.
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