Adam Wingard’s “Onslaught” is a welcome and stylish return for one of the most dynamic, exciting, and idiosyncratic voices in horror/action cinema. A clean, mean story that feels like an 80’s Carpenter joint run through a ragged filter of post-Iraqi-Freedom malaise, conspiracy-brained pulp iconography, and a fury that can barely be contained behind the gleeful spewing of blood by the bucketful, “Onslaught” is a brutal slasher film that trades a machete for semi-automatic rifles, a rage powered primal scream against the overlords of power that try to stamp their thumb onto the necks of regular folks caught in the crossfire of the military colonialization complex, and especially the veterans of needless foreign wars left to wither and die alone for their service. This thing lays its foot on the gas and does not let up, yet still somehow allows space for characters that it’s easy to love and mourn the loss of. A lesser film, and there have been many made of this ilk, would treat the bloodletting as joyous, celebratory, even psycho-sexual for an audience eager to munch on cinematic roadkill. “Onslaught” is a better film than that; it is more nuanced, more thoughtful, which feels wild to say but can only be understood if one is willing to dig beneath the dermal layer and find the jet fuel pulsating beneath its thick, veiney flesh. This is a movie about what happens when corporations trade bodies for bucks, when innovation and capitalism run roughshod over false values in favor of “a greater good”, and a country is willing to slip into bed with genociders, war criminals, and the moral scum of the Earth; at a certain point it’s hard to tell where they start and you end, “Society” style. (RIP Screaming Mad George. The real ones know.) “Onslaught” is not a sermon; it’s more entertaining than that. But rest assured, it is surely about US, a self-portrait of ourselves as both eager executioners and unwilling cannon fodder paving the path along the jackbooted march of progress; a snake consuming itself to a symphony of submachine guns and “America the Beautiful”. Tread on that.
“Onslaught” follows a science experiment gone disastrously wrong. In the middle of the New Mexican desert, a private military organization has been trying to create super soldiers devoid of empathy, whose only reason to exist is to slaughter anyone who gets in their path. The creator of these behemoths is a balding, stiletto-licking Nazi scientist, Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens), a third-generation “Operation Paperclip” graduate, who sees his mission in America as continuing the grand tradition of the Third Reich. In his Area 51-style bunker, Kammler has taken three broken soldiers left over from the scrap heap of the US military and remolded them into flesh-and-blood Terminators: white-eyed wraiths who operate in pristine unison, heat-seeking missiles whose target is any living thing. Meanwhile, at a trailer park near the facility, a retired soldier, Celeste (Adria Arjona), is doing her best to return to some semblance of normalcy after her tours while haunted daily by the savagery she witnessed overseas. A divorced mother, Celeste is well-meaning but a bit of a mess, keeping illegally procured machine guns lying around her trailer when she’s not using them to blow away jack-o’-lanterns in the desert. As a part of her little trailer park community, which includes a fellow veteran, a moronic cop who likes listening to “McGruff the Crime Dog” tapes, and a well-meaning pair of punks, Celeste has found herself a scuzz colored oasis, a place that may not be comforting but is, at the very least, home. But when her ex-husband brings her daughter, Daisy (Blake Kennedy), for an unexpected weekend visit, Celeste is forced to put the guns away and play house, desperate to find some sense of connection with her well-adjusted daughter who feels uncomfortable calling her “Mom”. Unfortunately for Celeste, that’s when the super-soldiers, code-named The Butcher, Cry Baby, and Cockroach, murder their way out of captivity and roar roughshod across the desert, heading straight for their quiet little trailer park. The war that Celeste has been running from has come home to roost, and her daughter is stuck right in the crosshairs.
“Onslaught” is the most tense that I’ve felt in a movie theater in a good long while, and much of that can be attributed to Wingard’s, along with co-writer and frequent collaborator Simon Barrett’s, framing of the three super soldiers. Cold, calculating, and cruel, these three experiments gone wrong are nightmares in flak jackets; their faces largely obscured so that only the lights of their eyes shine through like those of a predator lurking in the shadows. Whether their weapons are a knife, a gun, a chainsaw, or a cleaver, their actions are precise, and their brutality is passionless. There’s no arguing with them, no mercy behind those eyes; only death in the most painful fashion. The fear wrought by these three is textual to the film, as Wingard allows them to present as similar to real-world horrors as possible. An early sequence where the trio burst into a gas station and make quick work of the regular folks congregating there is brash and upsetting. The blood spray of the patrons is painful and raw. Details only add to the horror, like the blue-stained teeth of a man who was happily drinking a Slurpee just before being gunned down. Wingard does not blink at the clear associations between his artifice and the wrenching reality of similar shootings that are allowed to happen all the time, that same terror leeching into us without feeling exploitative. What’s more, the people who die are kind; they’re people we’ve already met in the movie, they’re people like us. In many ways, beyond the marrow-deep thrill of an action film with this much panache and style, the film’s greatest triumph is its ability to zag from the conventions of genre, or even ordinary three-act structure, in favor of telling a straightforward story of survival. There is little melodrama to be found here, and few actions that feel out of character or scripted. By the time the trio reaches the trailer park, the audience is well assured of what they mean to enact upon the quiet families living in this small patch of sand in the middle of nowhere. We dread it, as we dread comparable atrocities happening every day, whether down the street or in similar desert communities far away. As it is with Celeste and her daughter, we all know in the back of our minds that the people meant to save us rarely have the means or the inclination to do so. In a world where war is the currency of progress, human bodies are more than expendable; they’re valuable chum to feed the machines of industry and political ambition. The only ones we can rely on are each other, and as Celeste faces down this triptych of doom, a living manifestation of American Imperial might, it’s easy to see ourselves kneeling right beside her; petrified but determined to live, if for no other reason than to stick it to those who value our lives as little more than data on the long curve to some sick utopia none of us will ever live to see. I told you this one had more on its mind than simple gunplay. I felt its brutality in my bones. It thrilled me, made me angry. It’s what the movies were made for.
“Onslaught” should be celebrated as Wingard/Barrett’s willful expulsion from the uber-blockbuster slog that has plagued their careers the past couple of years. For these two, whose independent genre films like “The Guest” and “You’re Next” are minted classics, you can feel the eagerness to scream in every frame of “Onslaught”, an anger at the world at large, at its cruelty and malice, that needed expulsion for the sake of their souls. Still, as the film ends and those left alive are faced with a world they can barely understand, I could not help but feel optimistic for their future; if they’ve made it through this, maybe they can make it through anything. Somehow, inexplicably, I left “Onslaught” feeling hopeful. I’m as surprised as anyone.
Take care of each other.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Onslaught” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
