Onslaught Dares You to Survive the Night

Washington City Paper · Chris Klimek · September 4, 2026

“It is tempting,” the psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote, “if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” And if your favorite filmmaker is John Carpenter , the synthesizer-playing low-budget auteur of Assault on Precinct 13 , Halloween , Escape from New York , and a half dozen other VHS-era classics, your homage movie shall necessarily look like Onslaught , director Adam Wingard ’s loud, lurid, and stylish siege flick set in a New Mexico trailer park. At a pithy 92 minutes, it’s got lots of gristle but zero fat.

Your final girl is Adria Arjona , rumored to be our next Wonder Woman and equal to the task. She plays Celeste , a former Army sniper struggling with long-term symptoms of combat-induced PTSD. The property manager of that trailer park, she’s the kind of lady who listens to Steely Dan on vinyl after a soothing afternoon of blasting jack-o’-lanterns into pumpkin-buckshot spice. Nothing about this woman indicates she should be the mother of an adorable moppet named Daisy ( Blake Kennedy , a remarkably nonirritating child actor), but she is. When her ex-husband makes a surprise visit to drop off the kid, Celeste races to lock up the arsenal of small arms littering her home.

Clearly the judge who awarded her ex primary custody made the right call. But then you never know when a trio of reanimated-corpse super-soldiers led by Brazilian UFC star Alex Pereira are going to break containment from a defense contractor’s nearby off-the-books lab and begin slaughtering every living creature that crosses their path. When that happens, Child Protective Services will be grateful Celeste keeps all that hardware around, even if she has no food for the child in her cupboards. They should be, anyway.

Obviously, these are not Steve Rogers -type super-soldiers, selected for selflessness and decency. They’re butcherers, with less personality (and less dialogue, by which I mean none) than Arnold Schwarzenegger had in The Terminator —another low-budget Reagan-era landmark to which Onslaught is a loving, synthesizer-scored mash note. (The music is by Matthew Pusti .)

Wingard took a break from his usual splattercore fare to make two enjoyable PG-13 Kaiju movies, most recently 2024’s Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire . The extremely R-rated Onslaught feels more like his natural habitat, and its lack of reliance on CGI-animated monsters allows cinematographer Oren Soffer ’s desert textures to pop. Wingard says it’s set in the same universe as 2014’s The Guest, which like Onslaught was directed by Wingard from a screenplay by Simon Barrett and starred Dan Stevens , albeit in a different role from the one he plays here. (In Onslaught , Stevens’ chiseled features are buried under a bald cap and milky contact lenses that make him resemble a satanic Brian Eno .)

Fan-service casting is part of the fun. Michael Biehn , hero of The Terminator and Aliens , has an undistinguished part as a minor cog in this rogue defense-contracting operation. Reginald VelJohnson , who played Bruce Willis ’s uniformed LAPD ally in Die Hard , gets more to do as an elderly veteran who lives in the trailer park. But Wingard is more generous with his regulars: I’m ashamed to tell you that Wingard four-timer Rebecca Hall has never been hotter than she is as the German-accented dominatrix-spouse to Wingard’s three-timer Stevens, who plays Nazi-descended mad scientist Hans Kammler .

There’s a whole B-plot involving Drew Starkey as yet another high-fashion government operative, this one brought in to erase all evidence of the super-soldier murder spree. He’s called into work while patronizing a sex dungeon under the influence of Molly, but he promises his superior, “I’ll ingest some protein just as soon as I can.” This sort of detail would, until recently, count as the kind of inspired embroidery that can distinguish a schlocky genre exercise. It still does, kind of, even if the idea of an executive branch full of amoral, drug-addled libertines is no longer fiction.

Want to indulge in nostalgia for an era when it was? Onslaught is a low-ambition flick executed at a high degree of craft. It would make an excellent double feature with the equally ’80s-coded but more family-friendly The End of Oak Street . Pop Onslaught into yer VHS player second—ideally, after midnight.

Onslaught (92 mins., a very grisly R) opens everywhere tonight, Sept. 4.

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