Onslaught Review: Style Over Substance Works When The Execution Is This Slick

Onslaught is a well-constructed horror-action movie that may be slight on storytelling, but works incredibly well as a brutal riff on slasher flicks. Published Sep 1, 2026, 3:26 PM EDT Brandon Zachary is a Lead Writer for Screen Rant's New Movie Team. He also writes or has written for Comicbook.com, CBR, That Hashtag Show, Just Watch, and TVBrittanyF. Brandon is an Emerging Screenwriters Semi-Finalist, co-writer of a Screencraft Quarter-Finalist, a seasoned on-screen interviewer, and a MASSIVE nerd. You can reach him at bs.zachary@gmail.com Adam Wingard is one of modern Hollywood's best genre filmmakers. Deeply invested in genre fare as a means of exploring prickly characters and heavy subjects, his best movies tend to be the ones that strike a balance between emotional complexity and bombastic schlock. You're Next and The Guest are modern classics, both serving as clear spiritual precursors to Onslaught. Playing like a Friday the 13th that takes cues from Call of Duty instead of Halloween, Onslaught is a brutal action/horror hybrid that may be a little light on substance, but nails its stylish approach. While the movie does have some clear interest in PTSD and the veteran experience, it's quickly overshadowed by an emphasis on brutal action and excess. The result is a movie that is a lot of fun in the moment, and it has some solid staying power, even if it can't quite match the heights of something like The Guest. There's an almost goofier sense of abandon to Onslaught that works in its favor, with clear influence from Sam Raimi and other grindhouse filmmakers. While it might not be his most compelling film, Wingard's latest is still a blast. Onslaught's Grisly Pleasures Are All On The Suface Onslaught is a fairly straightforward horror movie when you get down to it, even with all the surface-layer character work and world-building. The first half lays the groundwork for a major convergence between two stories. In one, former US Army sniper Celeste (Adria Arjona) manages her trailer park while caring for her daughter. In another, a German scientist's (Dan Stevens) Super Soldier goes off the rails. The result is a trio of remorseless, brutal soldiers, who have been conditioned to feel no pain and are enhanced in grounded ways, escaping containment and quickly laying waste to everyone in their path. While there is some early explanation about these super soldiers, the trio, codenamed Butcher (Alex Pereira), Crybaby (Tyler Hall), and Cockroach (Dave Campbell), receive no actual development. They are meant to be modern slasher monsters, demented killing machines who couldn't stop killing even if they wanted to. This is where Wingard's grindhouse influences most come into clear view, especially in the second half of the movie, once Celeste and her neighbors find themselves contending with the trio and their brutal tactics. The action is vicious and grisly, with the film taking grim satisfaction in details like the lingering, burning corpse of a victim who fell on a lit barbecue, or the objectively over-the-top nature of one of the soldiers running around with a chainsaw over his head, Leatherface-style. Wingard and his team know how to deliver on both the action and the horror, blending the two styles together well. Onslaught Is Missing The Little Things That Could've Made It Truly Great While action junkies will love the surface-level bombast of Onslaught, the film doesn't quite match that with emotional interiority. Celeste is a strong character and a solid contrast to the trio, clearly contending with her own trauma even as she retains her humanity. She becomes emboldened by it in a way the trio simply can't. While there are some compelling ideas in the film, including the lore teases that the soldiers were designed as a false flag operation that could be used to destabilize domestic civilian populations, those touches are largely underplayed. It's similar to how The Guest slipped in some cutting satire about the military industrial complex's dehumanization of people into "weapons," a clear focal point for Wingard. The difference is that The Guest added a cerebral, emotional layer to the killer, making Dan Stevens' David a genuinely tragic figure even when he couldn't help but kill everyone around him. The Butcher and his compatriots are far more akin to Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers: implacable killers with memorable designs who lack any clear personality. ...as long as you go in expecting a brutal time, Onslaught delivers a memorable slaughter. The movie is less thematically ambitious as a result. That doesn't make it bad by any stretch of the imagination. It has Stevens as an evil German scientist; Rebecca Hall as his domineering wife; and Drew Starkey as a government agent trying to investigate the ordeal while on MDMA. It's a movie that leans into the ridiculous nature of the concept and mines it for all it can, and especially for fans of action and horror, it's a lot of fun. It doesn't have the kind of emotional depth that can elevate the best films in either genre, but there is enough solid characterization and thematic throughlines to keep it compelling. So, as long as you go in expecting a brutal time, Onslaught delivers a memorable slaughter. Onslaught releases in theaters nationwide on Friday, September 4. Onslaught 7/10 Release Date September 4, 2026 Runtime 92 Minutes Director Adam Wingard Writers Simon Barrett, Adam Wingard