Adam Wingard's Onslaught is largely content on being a slick, blunt, and straightforward slasher film. With a typical B-movie premise, it pays homage to classic grindhouse films while mostly sticking to style over substance. The story has deeper layers than a standard-issue creature versus human story on paper. It tackles themes of post-traumatic stress disorder, government manipulation and population control, but the film mostly sticks to tried-and-tested grindhouse thriller tropes.
In Onslaught, Adria Arjona plays a former military officer struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. She lives alone at a trailer park until her husband visits her, asking her to take care of their daughter while he travels. Interestingly, she has been a park resident for four years, as she likes the solitude that comes with it and the expansive space that allows for target practice. Soon, all those hours of practice pay off, with her haven becoming a hellhole as three genetically altered super soldiers get out of a military experiment site and embark on a killing spree.
Director: Adam Wingard
Cast: Adria Arjona, Rebecca Hall, Drew Starkey
Wingard and his co-writer Simon Barrett weave some intriguing elements of administration and politics into the screenplay, offering some food for thought in an otherwise straightforward action film. This is the bare minimum, but for hardcore fans of the genre, it comes as a relief that the film at least provides it. For example, we are told that the soldiers are not mere weapons for the battlefield; they also present a way for the government to control the population. These are traumatised veterans broken by warfare whose psyches are repurposed into a psychedelic force designed to subjugate the same populace they once swore to protect. Rebecca Hall plays ice-cold, administrative cruelty so effectively here. Her character is the most intriguing of the lot—an official who represents the side of the military in the subjugation of the commoner. She is dispassionate and regal, and treats human life as disposable and controllable ‘assets’. The soldiers, on the other hand, act on command, killing everyone who gets in their way callously and treating those lives as collateral damage.
While Arjona's veteran isolates herself to deal with her post-war trauma and tries to retain her sense of humanity, Hall's character represents the very institution stripping that humanity away for power and control. These elements, reminiscent of films such as John Carpenter’s They Live, give Onslaught an edge over other run-of-the-mill films in the genre. However, the film treats them as mere tangential flavours and is more busy appealing to our primal pleasures than building on its nuances. Unfortunately, even if you look at it as a standard B movie, what stops it from being a solid one is the climax, which feels rather rushed. Wingard keeps us waiting for a long time before unleashing sheer mayhem at the end with Arjona and the soldiers going head to head at the trailer park. This stretch is high on style, but it lacks the tension and intrigue of a taut thriller, with the protagonist managing to eliminate the enemies rather easily. Arjona shows sparks of stardom throughout, but the film does not quite explode the same way as her character. When it finishes with an open ending, you realise that there is no bigger monster than the promise of a sequel to a forgettable film.