Celeste (Adria Arjona) is a troubled ex-Marine roughing it out in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by similar misfits and discontents, and guns, loads and loads of them. When others shoot the breeze, she literally takes her guns out and does target practice, on carved Halloween pumpkins.

Having her ex drop their young daughter (Blake Kennedy) for the weekend to this trailer park is a dangerous enough proposition.

But that’s not the half of it.

It is only one of the many misconstrued pieces of the puzzle that is Onslaught – seemingly talking a lot, but actually not saying anything.

The opening credits roll out against a montage that goes backwards from Barack Obama and Afghanistan to Woodrow Wilson and World War I, a snapshot of all misadventures by America towards being ‘the land of the free and home of the brave’. That includes all those top-secret experiments in off-the-record black sites.

One such experiment is happening in Celeste’s backyard. Having noticed two Black Hawks flying overhead in close succession (the film itself covers a 24-hour timeframe), she suspects something is afoot. She shares that suspicion with a fellow veteran soldier and trailer neighbour, Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson).

At the other end of the suspicion lie a German couple, played by Dan Stevens and a criminally underused Rebecca Hall. When he is not crawling on all fours to lick her shoes, in presumably a sexual fetish (the vague Nazi comparison is meant to be all-explaining), he is flying out to the facility near Celeste’s to fashion “super soldiers”.

As Hall explains later, much later, they are US soldiers who once had a bloody, traumatic experience in combat, and whose brains have now been tinkered with to leave them without a conscience, so that they would have no compunction when used against their own people by governments.

Really, governments are struggling with this particular problem?

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Anyway, in Onslaught, this is a take-off point for the three untested soldiers to, of course, break free and unleash havoc – eventually making their way to Celeste’s trailer park, where her Marine will stop at nothing to play Mom.

Adam Wingard (The Guest, Godzilla vs Kong) returns, somewhat to his indie horror roots with this slasher thriller film, with A24’s backing. But there is not enough slash for a slasher, if that is your thing; and there is not enough surprise for it to be a thriller. Worst of all, there is too much turning up the nose at the government when you are not looking to actually raise a stink.

Arjona again demonstrates an ability to hold your attention, but Wingard keeps turning around to the three super soldiers silhouetted against the night sky, their eyes glinting (they can see in the dark, you see), standing between the trailers and holding not just guns but also chainsaws, cleavers etc etc.

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In the words of Stevens’s mad scientist Hans Kemmler, the three are “human equivalents of a heat-seeking missile”. If that’s your thing…

Onslaught movie director: Adam Wingard


Onslaught movie cast: Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall, Reginald VelJohnson, Blake Kennedy, Drew Starkey


Onslaught movie rating: 2 stars