Adam Wingard’s “Onslaught” plays it too safe — Adria Arjona deserves sharper material
Few career arcs in modern genre cinema are quite as fascinating as the indie director who dips into studio waters and then wades back to the shallows, reeled in by nostalgia, freedom, or sheer exhaustion. Adam Wingard knows the cycle intimately. He built his reputation on scrappy, blood-soaked thrillers like You’re Next and The Guest, only to spend the next half-decade wrestling with franchise beasts — a Blair Witch sequel, a Death Note adaptation, and two Godzilla vs Kong blockbusters with a combined budget hovering around $300m. His new film, Onslaught, is his homecoming. But somewhere between the arthouse grit of his roots and the polish he picked up at the studio table, the gonzo energy has been muted.
An A-plus ambition, a B-minus result
Wingard has called Onslaught “an A-plus B-movie,” an attempt to fuse the gleeful chaos of low-budget mayhem with the sheen and structure of bigger productions. It’s a pitch that, on paper, lands beautifully. In practice, the result lands somewhere around a B-minus: technically slick, atmospherically competent, but missing the feral spark that made his early work so beloved.
The premise is pure B-movie gold. Evil German scientist Hans Kammler — played with relish by Dan Stevens, a Wingard regular clearly having the time of his life — has helped the US government create a platoon of genetically engineered super soldiers. Think Michael Myers cross-bred with a heat-seeking missile. When an experiment goes catastrophically wrong at a desert research facility, the soldiers are unleashed on the nearest population centre: a sparse trailer park overseen by Celeste (Adria Arjona), an ex-soldier and single mother still wrestling with PTSD. The opening scene features a row of Halloween pumpkins being obliterated by gunfire — a knowing wink to anyone familiar with the slasher canon.
It is, undeniably, a film that looks like a proper film. In 2026, that alone is worth celebrating. Wingard’s eye for composition hasn’t dulled, and the desert palette gives the proceedings a dusty, sun-bleached menace.
Arjona carries the centre
If Onslaught belongs to anyone, it belongs to Arjona. She’s been quietly assembling one of the most compelling action-star résumés in Hollywood — her turn in Blink Twice functioned almost as a calling card for exactly this kind of role — and here she gets to shoot, quip, and chainsaw her way through chaos with the kind of weary, steely charisma the material demands. Celeste is a single mum with an in-trailer armoury and a daughter more emotionally composed than she is. It’s not deep, but it doesn’t need to be. Final girls rarely come with CVs.
What’s frustrating is how thin the situations around her remain. Wingard places Arjona in a series of confrontations that should pop with invention but instead drift past with mild interest. There’s no shortage of ingredients — a sadistic S&M-loving cleanup agent on MDMA (a gleeful Drew Starkey), Rebecca Hall as a frigid corporate operative, a desert setting that practically begs for a dust-choked set piece — and yet the film never quite ignites.
The slasher-action identity crisis
The core problem is one of genre indecision. Onslaught wants to be both an action film and a slasher, but the two genres have fundamentally different appetites. Slashers thrive on scarcity: a single weapon, a masked pursuer, the dread of what might be around the corner. Action films thrive on escalation: bigger guns, louder bangs, escalating body counts. Combining them is a known tightrope, and here Wingard keeps slipping into the gap between.
Handing the villains firearms, for instance, drains the primal terror out of the chase sequences. Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Ghostface — none of them need bullets to be terrifying. There’s a reason for that. When Wingard’s super soldiers do resort to improvised weapons, the results are briefly thrilling, but the film keeps cutting away from the carnage at precisely the wrong moments, as though a studio executive’s ghost is still hovering behind the camera insisting on PG-13 optics.
What we get instead is a strange hybrid: sanitised violence punctuated by flashes of genuine weirdness. Hall’s dominatrix gets a chilling monologue. Starkey’s drugged-out agent provides a couple of the film’s best lines. But these are garnish, not main course.
The homecoming that almost was
It’s not that Onslaught is a disaster. It’s perfectly watchable, often handsome, and anchored by a lead performance that elevates everything around it. But after years of Wingard being a darling of genre festivals and cult midnight screenings, Onslaught feels like a director still finding his way back to his own voice. The polish is real, but so is the sense that the film has been kept on too short a leash.
For a film promising an onslaught, it ends up feeling more like a skirmish.
Onslaught is out in US cinemas on 4 September, the UK on 11 December and in Australia at a later date.
Why it Matters
Onslaught lands at a moment when Hollywood is increasingly raiding its back catalogue of genre IP and wondering why audiences have stopped turning up. Wingard’s return to indie roots was always going to be a bellwether for whether the studio-to-indie pipeline can yield genuinely fresh work, or simply more polished retreads. The answer here is uncomfortably muted. With a charismatic lead, a willing cast, and a director who clearly still has the craft, Onslaught should have been a riot. Instead, it serves as a reminder that the difference between a good time at the pictures and a great one often comes down to whether the filmmaker is willing to let the audience feel the mess.