Onslaught review: The nastiest action thriller of 2026, and also the most important

Onslaught, Adam Wingard’s gnarly action thriller (and covert sequel to his cult 2014 film The Guest), checks all the boxes of a grindhouse throwback. I hooted and hollered as a trio of zombified super-soldiers faced off against a chainsaw-wielding Adria Arjona. But maybe most unexpectedly, for a last-days-of-summer romp, I also thought deeply about the state of the world.

Wingard’s movie flays off its fair share of skin, but also gets underneath its viewers’. Hold on: we’re going for a ride.

Onslaught is oozing with brain matter

According to a 2025 report published by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, roughly one-third of Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel are military veterans. In that context, ICE's violent invasion of U.S. cities and murder of multiple citizens over the last 19 months can be seen as our foreign military strategy suddenly pointed back at the civilians it's presumably meant to defend. This may seem jarring — because it is — but for a certain type of political history junkie, it's not even the slightest bit of a surprise.

Imperial Boomerang theory was first proposed by Afro-Martinican poet, author, and politician Aimé Césaire in his 1951 book, Discourse on Colonialism. In it, he argues that the policies and techniques a government employs against other countries in the name of imperialism will eventually be used against that country's own citizens. Césaire went so far as to argue that the rise of the Nazi party was simply European colonialism boomeranging back against its own people.

The same goes for plenty of modern American history. In 1985, when the Philadelphia Police Department dropped a bomb out of a helicopter onto the headquarters of Black revolutionary group MOVE, that was the boomerang effect from methods developed a decade earlier bombing the jungle in Vietnam. The Imperial Boomerang’s elliptical arc has returned to us in the form of ICE’s warfare-like approach, which makes Onslaught feel like the perfect movie for our extremely jarring times.

Image: A24

Onslaught is Imperial Boomerang theory made cinema and then filtered through the dark camera lens of sci-fi horror master John Carpenter (with a sprinkle of James Cameron's Terminator franchise and a healthy splash of Kill Bill's bright-red blood). Wingard and his longtime screenwriting collaborator Simon Barrett open on Arjona alone in the desert shooting pumpkins with her sniper rifle. In just a few seconds, Wingard unsubtly announces the various genres and tropes to expect: horror, guns, violence, and Adria Arjona.

A moment later, the title card and credits roll over a series of pulsating images and videos depicting various wars, military violence, coups, etc. Subtlety is thrown out the window. This isn't that kind of movie.

Arjona shines in an eclectic ensemble cast

Image: A24

Arjona plays Celeste, a former military sniper struggling with PTSD. She works as the manager of a trailer park in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico and spends most of her time drinking, cleaning her guns, and collecting rent. At the start of the film, Celeste's ex-husband shows up unannounced with their very young daughter and leaves her there for the night, claiming some sort of work emergency. It's terrible timing, not just because Celeste is out of food and her house is full of illegal firearms, but because a secret military facility nearby has been experimenting with super-soldiers and three of those soldiers just broke loose.

Dan Stevens, who's appeared in multiple Wingard projects including his MonsterVerse movies and The Guest, gets just the right amount of screen time as a completely unrecognizable German mad scientist. He's collected three completely irredeemably American soldiers and transformed them into unstoppable killing machines. A demonstration of their abilities, overseen by sci-fi legend Michael Biehn as a shady government operative, goes horribly long and the super-soldiers are unleashed on the nearby population, leading to a confrontation with Celeste and a few of her neighbors.

Vulnerable but thick-skinned, unpredictable and calculating, Arjona is a perfect lead in Onslaught. We get just enough backstory of her experience as a military sniper to explain why she's so clearly traumatized. Some of that is told directly in flashbacks, while other details are layered into the story more subtly — like the way she has to jab at a wound in her arm so she can steady herself before lining up a shot with her rifle. Also, Arjona looks damn good wielding a blood-soaked chainsaw.

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• Image: A24
• Image: A24
• Image: A24

Celeste's neighbor Reginald VelJohnson is another standout, and Wingard weaponizes our nostalgia for the actor as a beat cop in both Die Hard and Family Matters to make us instantly sympathize with this aging, chain-smoking, shotgun-wielding hero. Not to downplay VelJohnson's performance. He's a total badass, but it helps that you love him before he ever opens his mouth to ask for another cigarette.

The only real weak spot in Onslaught is Drew Starkey as a drugged-up government agent who gets pulled onto the case but never does much of anything. Starkey is fine in the role, coolly conveying both his steely resolve to get the job done and the MDMA coursing through his bloodstream, which yields some much-needed comic relief. The scariest reveal of the film is that he's not here to stop the killers, but to take out any survivors they leave behind. Starkey still doesn't really have much to do, unfortunately, and his scenes feel more like an attempt to pad the 92-minute runtime than anything particularly additive to its plot or themes.

John Carpenter meets Quentin Tarantino

The main draw is the action, and Wingard doesn't disappoint. It's gross, violent, and gleeful, mixing the relentless horror of slashers like Halloween and Terminator with the stylized visuals of Quentin Tarantino's best work. Wingard even tweaked the fake blood recipe to match the bright-red palette of Kill Bill. Onslaught isn't quite as bloody, but it comes close.

The super-soldiers themselves mostly feel anonymous and interchangeable, despite each getting their own blood-curdling backstories narrated early on by Stevens. They start out with machine guns, but by the end they're wielding whatever they can get their hands on, including a massive butcher knife and a chainsaw. The trio moves like a well-trained military unit, communicating with sparse hand signals and executing each kill with startling precision, but they're also not above wildly chasing down a small girl with a giant knife if it comes down to that. It's like if Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees went through military training together and then came back home to kill all those annoying teenagers once and for all.

Image: A24

The soundtrack is another example of the way Wingard mixes his influences to create something new. The score by Matt Pusti riffs directly on John Carpenter's Halloween theme, taking that iconic keyboard riff and infusing it with techno and rock guitar when a scene calls for it (and also links it spiritually to composer Steve Moore’s work in The Guest). But Wingard also leans heavily into needledrops — with a twist. Most of the movie's recognizable songs are played as German covers that Steven's character listens to via Bluetooth headphones.

Most of Onslaught feels like a tribute to something: Tarantino's stylish violence, Carpenter's relentless killers, and the entire generation of grindhouse cinema that inspired them both. But what makes Wingard's movie more than just a remix is the brutally relevant message sitting right on its surface. Characters like Beatrix Kiddo and Michael Myers kill out of some sense of twisted vengeance. Hell, even the T-800 had a mission in Terminator. But the monsters in Onslaught don't need a reason to maim and murder. They're just following their programming and doing exactly what the U.S. government wants them to: kill its own civilians.

By combining those horror and action influences with the terrors of the military-industrial complex and the ways it often boomerangs back on its own people, Wingard forges a new type of movie. One where the violence isn't random at all. It's intentional. We're all the target. And the only culprit is our own government.

Onslaught releases in theaters on Sept. 4, 2026.