In a sentenceMichael Biehn is in it, which tells you exactly which decade the film would rather be living in
Celeste (Adria Arjona) is a veteran raising a child on her own, and the night this film covers begins with the sound of something arriving outside. What arrives are soldiers, though not the kind she served with: built to order, armoured, and pointed at civilians by a programme that was only ever meant to be pointed abroad. Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) and his wife Hanna (Rebecca Hall) are the people with titles rather than callsigns, which in this kind of film tells you what you need to know. In and around the building are Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), Baylor (Michael Biehn) and Kovacks (Eric Wareheim); coming through the wall is a man billed only as The Butcher (Alex Pereira). Celeste wants her child to see morning. There is a chainsaw, and she knows how to use it.
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Adam Wingard goes back to the small siege film he does well, with Adria Arjona holding the door. The style is sure and the score is a pleasure; the film keeps promising a rampage and delivers it in instalments.
Adam Wingard has spent the last few years in the company of giant monsters, and Onslaught is his way back to the ground. It is a siege film, 92 minutes long, with a 15 certificate and a script by his regular collaborator Simon Barrett, and its ambitions are the old ones: one woman, one building, one night of men who want to get in. The men are soldiers of an improved kind, and the woman is Celeste (Adria Arjona), a veteran who knows what is coming. That the whole thing plays like a John Carpenter film from around 1980 is the pitch.
Arjona is the reason to see it, and the film has the sense to know this. She plays Celeste without a scene of self-pity, a veteran and a mother who checks every room for its exits and only lets the fear show when there is nobody left to see it. When the film hands her a chainsaw, she holds it low and ready, the way a person who has used one would, and for a few minutes the film is what its title promises. She is better than the picture around her.
The craft is tidy, and tidiness is a mixed blessing here. Oren Soffer lights everything clean and hard, so the blood reads as colour rather than as mess, and there is not a murky frame in the film. Tom Hammock’s production design gives Celeste a building whose corridors we can hold in our heads, and Alexis Forte’s costumes tell us who is a soldier and who is not from across a dark room. Matthew Pusti’s score is synth from first note to last, a low Carpenter throb under the talk and a squall over the fights.
The trouble is that Wingard and Barrett are more in love with the set-up than with what it is for. The first act lays out the conspiracy, the soldiers, the doctor and his wife (Dan Stevens and Rebecca Hall as Hans and Hanna Kammler), and the men who will spend the night in and around the building: Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson), Baylor (Michael Biehn), Kovacks (Eric Wareheim). It is quick, confident work. Then the assault arrives in pieces: a burst of violence, a pause for someone to explain, another burst. Josh Schaeffer and Adam Avery cut the waiting as fast as the fights, so the film never sits still long enough for dread to build.
Here is what we felt. The first breach had us properly on edge, because the film had spent twenty minutes teaching us the doors and then sent something through one of them. Somewhere past the hour we noticed we were waiting rather than watching, and that is a bad thing to notice in a 92-minute film. The film wants to say something about what happens when weapons built for other people’s countries are turned on the people who paid for them. It says it, in dialogue, and goes back to the door. We agreed with it and were not moved by it.
Stevens, so good for Wingard in The Guest, has little to play here beyond a title and a suit. Hall has less. Alex Pereira, billed as The Butcher, is a large man who hits things, and the film is not interested in him as anything else. The soldiers are a threat but never a presence, and a siege lives or dies on what is outside.
You’re Next (2011) and The Guest (2014) were also small films about houses and intruders, and both knew exactly when to turn the joke into a threat. Onslaught has the same surface and less nerve. The reviews so far are split almost exactly down the middle. Casting Michael Biehn and Reginald VelJohnson is a nod to The Terminator and Die Hard that the intended audience will enjoy, and it is also the kind of nod a film makes when it would rather remind you of other films than be one.
Worth an evening if the genre is yours, late and with the volume up for Pusti. Do not go in expecting the rampage the title sells. It is a siege, a well-mannered one, and the woman holding the door is the best thing in it by some distance.
The reviews split almost evenly, and few critics are indifferent. Most agree Adria Arjona holds the film together as a veteran single mother turned one-woman army, and that Adam Wingard is more comfortable at this scale than in his recent studio work. The craft draws steady credit: polished, efficient direction, a synth-heavy John Carpenter homage, and violence that several reviewers find satisfyingly bloody.
Where they part is on whether there is anything underneath. The sceptics find the script undercooked and the villains faceless, and The New York Times and Vulture judge its politics of forever wars gestured at rather than argued. The Wrap complains the promised mayhem keeps failing to arrive. The spread is wide: /Film hails it as a worthy heir to Carpenter, while Polygon thinks the political point lands. Whether it has a brain seems to depend on how much the viewer wants one.
The critic calls it a well-crafted B-movie that delivers super-soldier slasher goods but is too enamored with its set-up and world-building, offering limited payoff and human interest.
Read the full review →The review highlights Wingard's return to basics with a lean military slasher inspired by John Carpenter, praising Arjona as a protective veteran mother in a thriller with strong genre roots.
Read the full review →Adam Wingard’s military slasher is a fun but scattered elevated genre romp that needs another draft to tighten its structure. It is counterbalanced by midnight verve and visceral violence that makes it just about worthwhile.
Read the full review →The film is a decent but restrained B-movie that showcases Wingard’s polished style without delivering enough gonzo fun or inventive set pieces. Arjona’s committed lead performance as the resourceful single mother is singled out as a highlight amid the sanitised action and slasher elements.
Read the full review →The critic praises the film's vivid details, craftsmanship, and Arjona's performance as a relatable lead but finds the narrative undercooked with unfulfilled promise and underdeveloped villains.
Read the full review →The return to indie horror is disappointing and generic despite its stylish references and gore. It piles up 1980s homages but lacks the brain or fun to make the one-woman-army story worthwhile.
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Assault on Precinct 13 · not reviewed yetCarpenter’s original one-building siege, on nothing, with a synth line Pusti clearly grew up on.
The GuestWingard and Barrett’s best film, with Dan Stevens as the soldier you should not have let in.
The RaidIndonesian tower-block siege that delivers the rampage this one keeps deferring.
Green RoomA punk band locked in a backstage room; small, nasty and patient about its violence.
La Horde · not reviewed yetFrench police and gangsters trapped in a Paris high-rise, with the dead on every floor.
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