Onslaught: what to know before you go
Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett reunite for a trailer-park siege picture. Here's the setup, the cast, and where the reviews have landed.
Onslaught · Dir. Adam Wingard · A24 · In theaters September 4
A24’s new one opens today, and it is the smallest-scale thing Adam Wingard has directed in years.
The setup
Adria Arjona plays Celeste, an army sniper living in a trailer park. Three genetically engineered super soldiers escape a secret military facility and start moving through everyone in their path. She has to keep her family alive.
Simon Barrett wrote the screenplay from a story he developed with Wingard. The two have been working together since You’re Next and The Guest, both of which took a contained premise and a limited location and got a lot out of them.
Who’s in it
Dan Stevens and Rebecca Hall play Hans and Hanna Kammler. Michael Biehn is in the cast, which for a film about engineered soldiers hunting people through a confined space is a pointed piece of casting. Drew Starkey, Reginald VelJohnson, Eric Wareheim and Alex Pereira round it out, with Pereira as The Butcher.
Where the reviews have landed
79% on Rotten Tomatoes out of the opening batch of reviews, averaging 6.9 out of 10. The comparison critics keep making is John Carpenter, specifically the siege structure of Assault on Precinct 13. Several have described it as unabashedly violent, and they mean that as a recommendation.
The response is not unanimous. Some outlets have been noticeably cooler, and the spread between the strongest and weakest notices is wider than a 79% suggests. That pattern usually means a film with a specific tone that either lands for you or does not.
Wingard has spent recent years on enormous monster films. This one puts him back in a single location with a small cast and a clear threat, which is where his instincts have always been sharpest. It is playing wide starting today.
