“Onslaught” may be rickety in structure — it often feels like three disparate movies, only two of which collide — but it’s a delightful return to form (and familiar territory) for its director, Adam Wingard. While his four most recent works have involved other people’s intellectual property (Netflix’s “Death Note,” the secret “Blair Witch” sequel, and a pair of “Godzilla vs. Kong” movies), his A24-produced latest plays in the familiar horror-thriller sandbox, subverting its norms in ways that made his older indies stand apart.
Some of Wingard’s earliest films, like “Home Sick” (2007) and “A Horrible Way to Die” (2010) played with the contours of serial killer cinema, but the filmmaker truly found his groove with the 2011 home-invasion romp “You’re Next,” co-written by frequent collaborator Simon Barrett. It saw a trio of masked hoodlums come up against a “final girl” — a staple of the slasher genre — whose paranoid, survivalist upbringing allowed her to turn the tables.
The hunted becoming a hunter is a key facet of “Onslaught,” in which a trio of mindless, experimental super soldiers are released into the wild. They hack-and-slash their way through a tiny town, only to come up against former sniper Celeste (Adria Arojna), a mother protecting her daughter in a desert trailer park. (There’s a third major character too, a lurid operative played by Drew Starkey, but he largely just observes these proceedings.)
Although the broad plot takes a while to cohere — Celeste and the soldiers’ inevitable skirmish is confined to the final act — the movie is, to butcher a spell from Harry Potter, Wingardian in its unfurling. This is owed, in part, to how smartly the filmmaker wields its characters’ backgrounds, yielding a tale of the military industrial complex coming home in heightened, operatic ways. Its villains are part Jason Bourne, part Michael Meyers. They’re products of ruthless training, as well as torture that saps them of all conscience, courtesy of Dan Stevens’ kooky Nazi scientist Dr. Hans Kammler.
Stevens was, notably, an idiosyncratic highlight as the Kaiju veterinarian Trapper, in Wingard’s “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” and he’s equally amusing here. But the duo’s first collaboration is especially instructive. After “You’re Next,” the director cast Stevens in 2014’s “The Guest,” where he played a charismatic soldier returning from Afghanistan, only to reveal himself as a programmed, sociopathic assassin. “The Guest” and “Onslaught” share this particular DNA (not to mention, their geographical setting; they unfold in the same small town), and they make for a particularly intriguing double feature.
Hollywood filmmaking is often reverential toward the U.S. army, to the point that even its critiques tend to target outliers (a product of the D.O.D. having its hands in numerous productions). But in “The Guest,” which follows the homecoming of an attractive, all-American hero, and in “Onslaught” — whose opening montage details just how trigger-happy the American military has been since the World War II — Wingard brings down the firm wall separating the War and Horror genres. He combines them with abandon, smashing together tropes and types, and in the process, remixing expectations.
The villains in both films are scientific experiments, but Wingard never shies away from the fact that at the core of their murderous personas is the brutality brought out by their military training. “Onslaught” sees soldiers thought to be dead being resurrected for this purpose; they were already killers, with nicknames like “the butcher” and “the cockroach.”
The third one, known as “crybaby,” even plays like a send-up of the shoot-and-cry genre of Hollywood cinema, in which guilt-ridden retrospectives center the feelings of American soldiers over their Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian victims. This particular soldier was known to shed tears to the point of madness, even as he massacred civilians, and his skills are put to efficient use in the afterlife.
Granted, Celeste is similarly a U.S. war veteran (as is her older neighbor Josiah, played by Reginald VelJohnson, with whom she makes her climactic stand), so the film valorizes its vets in the very same breath. However, Celeste is also unique among the crop of returning military heroes, in that she’s extremely paranoid, and broken by her memories, but in a way that never suggests absolution. This is just who she is now, and it’s what makes her as efficient a killer as the super-soldier trio.
There’s a twist late into the runtime that doesn’t feel especially well established, connecting Celeste to one of the invading gunmen. But much more important is the fact that their past skirmish (in addition to their past training) has come home in violent forms. Very few American films are about this phenomenon: the imperial boomerang, which suggests that America’s fascistic wartime tactics abroad are eventually aimed homeward, upon a vulnerable domestic populace. It’s an almost daring stand to take, even for a lurid genre film, because it holds to account the familiar iconography of a revered institution.
By bastardizing this military worship, and exposing its ugly underbelly, Wingard combines the anti-militarism of “The Guest” with the final girl metamorphoses of “You’re Next,” and creates, in “Onslaught,” a surprisingly fun slasher movie that turns cinema’s heroes into mindless killers, and its frequent victim into a predator. The movie doesn’t work one hundred percent of the time — when it finally sets off its fireworks, its violence rests on repeated beats — but few filmmakers so seasoned in the studio space have so smartly scrutinized what we watch, and how we watch it, before trying to turn familiar modes of viewing on their head.
Image credit: “Onslaught”
This guest post is written by the best in the business, world class film critic Siddhant Adlakha.
