{"id":601783,"date":"2026-08-31T17:40:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T17:40:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/601783\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T17:40:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T17:40:17","slug":"onslaught-review-adria-arjona-dan-stevens-in-adam-wingard-thriller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/601783\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Onslaught’ Review: Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens in Adam Wingard Thriller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIf nothing else, Onslaught<\/a> stands as proof that director Adam Wingard<\/a>, making his way back to lean, mean originals after a decade in the IP mines, hasn\u2019t lost his touch for the sort of deliciously vivid details that suggest motherlodes of stories unto themselves.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the first few minutes alone, we get grinning jack-o\u2019-lanterns lined up in a dusty canyon, exploding one by one in target practice. A knife slicing through gnarled, unpeeled carrots that look like nothing so much as human fingers. An ancient Nazi scientist (Dan Stevens<\/a>) crawling across a carpet to lick a woman\u2019s stilettoed foot.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tOnslaught\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tTons of promise, not quite enough payoff.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRelease date: Friday, Sep. 4
Cast: Adria Arjona, Blake Kennedy, Reginald VelJohnson, Eric Wareheim, Dan Stevens, Michael Biehn, Rebecca Hall
Director: Adam Wingard
Screenwriters: Adam Wingard, Simon Barrett
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRated R,
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 32 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tEach image lands as a promise \u2014 an amuse-bouche for the veritable feast of ultraviolence sure to come once all these disparate elements start to crash and burn into one another. But building anticipatory buzz is one thing; paying it off is another. Gloriously crafted if narratively undercooked, the action-thriller is a pretty good time. It\u2019s just that it had seemed for a moment like it was going to be a great one.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe pumpkin shooter turns out to be Celeste (Adria Arjona<\/a>), a former Army sniper with the shaky hands, extensive gun collection and dirty-dish-filled sink of someone barely keeping it together. Wracked with PTSD, she\u2019s retreated in her civilian life into a remote desert trailer park populated by other mild eccentrics who seem more comfortable removed from the rest of the world, including a kindly Vietnam vet (Reginald VelJohnson as Josiah) and a bitter drunk of a cop (Eric Wareheim as Kovacks).<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the relative safety of Windy Oasis is violated when a trio of super-soldiers escape from a top-secret military bunker up the road. As these experiments, described to one eager businessman as \u201cthe human equivalent of heat-seeking missiles,\u201d close in, Celeste must take up arms to protect herself, her young daughter (Blake Kennedy\u2019s Daisy) and her community.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn other words: Expect a home invasion thriller, of the sort Wingard made his name on in 2011\u2019s You\u2019re Next and 2014\u2019s The Guest<\/a>. On that front, Onslaught delivers well enough. Between the soldiers\u2019 imperviousness to bullets, immunity to pain and indifference to conscience, it doesn\u2019t take long before they rack up a body count in the dozens \u2014 chopping through walls and punching through windows and blowing off heads with cold, mechanical relentlessness.<\/p>\n

\n\tFine craftsmanship can be seen on every level of the action. Nick Interlandi\u2019s soundscapes swell with the rat-a-tat of machine guns, or zero in on the precise, satisfying crunch of glass cracking under bone, while Oren Soffer\u2019s cinematography runs the gamut from sickly clinical to startlingly sensual.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet, the second half of the movie can\u2019t feel like something of a letdown \u2014 as if Wingard, having shown us all the cool shiny toys he has at his disposal, has forgotten to come up with anything to do with them beyond smash them together.<\/p>\n

\n\tStevens\u2019 Kammler makes a big immediate impression as a pervy little freak, but then gets less room than you might hope to swan around in his snow-white capes. Rebecca Hall<\/a>, playing his elegantly domineering wife, gets even less. Deep into the second act, Drew Starkey<\/a> has an all-timer of an intro as elite operative Cyrus, the camera practically caressing his bare torso as he rolls on molly and ogles G-string-clad women in a sex club. But I\u2019d be hard-pressed to say what the character actually accomplishes beyond stand around various scenes of carnage; at one point, in fact, he\u2019s explicitly instructed not to do anything at all.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe political themes hinted at by the opening collage \u2014 clips of robot soldiers and photos of Abu Ghraib torture victims and headlines about the U.S. embrace of Nazi scientists after World War II, all conspiring to remind us that the American military has always been capable of profound horror \u2014 never completely fade from view. But they never really get fleshed out any further, either. The potential to tap into the ambient paranoia of our current militarized age goes unfulfilled.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat Onslaught does remember to develop are the good guys, far less colorful than the villains but, in their down-to-earth relatability, no less compelling. Celeste should be another feather in the cap for Arjona, a wonderfully versatile actor who\u2019s been steadily on the rise for the past few years. Here, she gets to glower and shoot and make a bloody mess with the best of the action-hero badasses. But she also gets to demonstrate the humor and warmth that\u2019s made her such a delight in films like Hit-Man<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s especially winsome in her scenes with Josiah, the two grizzled vets teasing each other or coming to each other\u2019s aid with the unspoken kinship that comes from shared experience. It\u2019s his unassuming decency, even more than Daisy\u2019s sweet innocence or Celeste\u2019s mama-bear toughness, that makes Windy Oasis feel like a world worth saving. One only wishes the film could have done the same while also making a fully satisfying meal of the cartoonish villains who\u2019ve come to destroy them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If nothing else, Onslaught stands as proof that director Adam Wingard, making his way back to lean, mean…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":601784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[152440,62768,23068,246615,146,85,46,397,62369,96110,152441],"class_list":["post-601783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-adam-wingard","tag-adria-arjona","tag-dan-stevens","tag-drew-starkey","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-onslaught","tag-rebecca-hall","tag-simon-barrett"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}