Adria Arjona spent two seasons of Andor absorbing punishment on behalf of other people’s grief. Adam Wingard’s answer to that: give her several guns and let her do the shooting.
That’s the pitch for Onslaught, and it lands in theaters Sept. 4.
The MonsterVerse guy is going back to what he’s good at
Wingard started out in low-budget horror before he became the man steering the MonsterVerse. He delivered the fight audiences had been asking about with 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, then returned a few years later with 2024’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Both were popcorn blockbusters built around big explosive action, the iconic mutant kaiju and everyone’s favorite ape.
So his announcement that he was leaving the franchise read as a surprise. Not to anyone who’d been following him from the start.
Before Godzilla, Wingard sharpened his instincts on intense action and horror, most notably You’re Next and The Guest, two films that drop an ordinary family into the path of unrelenting evil. Onslaught fuses those two halves of his career into an unholy Frankenstein-esque monster.
A sniper, a trailer park and a very bad week
Arjona stars as Celeste, an army sniper and single mother living in a trailer park, doing what she can to give her young daughter a decent life. Then it gets harder. A group of super soldiers has escaped a secret military facility, and they want to hunt down and hurt her family.
The trailer offers no real reason why. But the super soldiers are described as the human equivalent of a “heat-seeking missile,” which makes it fair to wonder whether they’re after something only Celeste has.
A24 is producing, and Simon Barrett, who’s collaborated with Wingard on several projects and mostly in horror, wrote the script. Between those two names, expect the film to go somewhere stranger than “single mom versus superpowered soldiers” suggests.
Dan Stevens calls it a spiritual sequel to The Guest
The cast is deep with familiar faces. Dan Stevens is here, and so is Rebecca Hall, who’s worked with Wingard twice already on The Guest and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
Alongside them: UFC pros Alex Pereira and Maurice Greene, Michael Biehn (The Terminator), Drew Starkey (Love, Simon), Eric Wareheim (Master of None) and Reginald VelJohnson (Die Hard).
At San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year, Stevens called Onslaught a “spiritual sequel” to The Guest, the horror-action film that made his name with a certain kind of viewer. In that one, Stevens plays U.S. soldier David Collins, who turns up at the Peterson home claiming friendship with their son Caleb, killed in combat in Afghanistan. David is a super soldier, programmed to kill anyone who might compromise his identity.
Sound familiar yet?
You don’t need homework for this one
Also at Comic-Con, Wingard confirmed Onslaught unfolds in the same town, and teased that the covert experimentation that produced David connects to what The Guest showed. Same universe sequel? Sure, call it that.
Still, it’s doubtful any Guest characters turn up, so walking in cold costs you nothing.
The runtime is 92 minutes, one hour and 32 minutes, which is barely enough room to pit one single mother against three super soldiers and make the fight feel fair. Figuring out the trick Wingard uses to even those odds is the whole reason to buy the ticket.
[…] away from Kaiju brawls to reunite with writer Simon Barrett and A24 for something much smaller. Onslaught is, ironically enough, an allegorical story about societal trauma, which his Godzilla films weren’t, despite the franchise’s […]