Review: 'Onslaught' is an incoherent and blood-soaked mess, a horny teen's dumb idea of sex and violence.
About the only thing going for “Onslaught” is that it’s the most accurately titled movie I’ve seen in a while — a brutal bloodbath of a thriller that runs supporting cast members and the audience through the meat grinder with nothing meaningful to show for it.
Somewhere way out in the New Mexico desert, there sit two locations that are conveniently close to each other for director Adam Wingard and writing partner Simon Barrett to let go unexploited. One is a trailer park, where Celeste (Adria Arjona), a former U.S. Army sniper who has PTSD over her Afghanistan experiences, lives near other outcasts, notably an old Vietnam War veteran, Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson). When the movie starts, Celeste’s ex (Jacob Scipio) has dropped off their 5-year-old daughter, Daisy (Blake Kennedy), for some unannounced custody time.
The other location in the desert is a super-secret military lab, where a former Nazi scientist — played by Dan Stevens, hamming it up with a bald cap and fringe hair on the back and sides — has been working to create an indestructible super-soldiers, tinkering with the DNA of military men believed to be dead or MIA. The leader of the three test subjects, nicknamed The Butcher, is played by MMA fighter Alex Pereira, to give you a sense of the physicality of the bad guys, and the amount of seriousness we’re expected to give anything that follows.
Of course, the super-soldiers escape containment and start messily killing anyone they come across, first at a truck stop mini-mart and eventually at Celeste’s trailer park. It’s there that Celeste tamps down her nerves and fights back to protect Daisy and lay waste to the three genetically altered monstrosities.
It’s clear that Wingard, who has directed the last two “Godzilla vs. Kong” movies, is trying to get back some of the blood-soaked glory of his earlier horror movies, like “You’re Next.” He’s also trying to set a record for the kinkiest way to introduce characters — both with Stevens’ Dr. Kemmler, crawling under the stiletto heel of his wife, Frau Kemmler (Rebecca Hall), and for the weird government operative, Cyrus (Drew Starkey), whose S&M session with topless women in leather is interrupted when he has to clean up the crime scenes left on the super-soldiers’ gory trail.
The whole exercise of “Onslaught” feels like an antisocial 15-year-old incel drew his most disturbing fantasies of sex and violence in a spiral binder, and those pages became the movie’s storyboards. Coherence and logic never survived the script stage, as Wingard seems intent on making the harshest bloody mess that the usually tasteful A24 will let him get away with. Here, he gets away with a boring murder, followed by another boring murder, and so on, in repulsive repetition.
——
‘Onslaught’
★
Opens Friday, September 4, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence, some gore, sexual material/nudity, and language. Running time: 92 minutes.