Adria Arjona in Onslaught. Photograph: Richard Foreman/Richard Foreman, Jr SMPSP View image in fullscreen Adria Arjona in Onslaught. Photograph: Richard Foreman/Richard Foreman, Jr SMPSP Thrillers Review Onslaught review – super soldier slasher doesn’t go hard enough There’s a committed performance from a spunky Adria Arjona in the Guest director Adam Wingard’s decent B-movie but it’s missing some sharper weaponry
Benjamin Lee Mon 31 Aug 2026 18.00 CEST Last modified on Mon 31 Aug 2026 18.02 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T here’s something rather fascinating about an indie director who heads to the A-list before returning to their roots, a wider skillset and different perspective gained for better or worse. Working within a stricter system – the tiniest of choices being agreed upon by the largest of committees – can often be a creatively crushing experience that we’ve heard gruesomely detailed by many who survived it but the expansion of what one is allowed to technically do with a bigger budget can also be instructive and enriching. The dream scenario is bringing back the good and allowing the bad to inspire new work that makes the most of how unshackled one again now is.
Read more There are plenty of examples of how this hasn’t worked. Neill Blomkamp following Elysium and Chappie with chintzy low-budget horror Demonic (easily his least effective film although since opening his own AI “studio” I imagine the worst is yet to come), Marc Forster following Quantum of Solace and World War Z with a blind Blake Lively film that, ironically, no one saw while Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck went from the greatness of Half Nelson to the blandness of Captain Marvel to the headache of Freaky Tales . But then we were also gifted with the hometown intimacy of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma after he came back from space for Gravity and Hogwarts for the Prisoner of Azkaban while Karyn Kusama brushed off the nightmare of Æon Flux with the brilliantly creepy dinner party thriller The Invitation .
Adam Wingard is a writer-director who broke out with the original low-budget thrillers You’re Next and The Guest before moving on to franchise fare like 2016’s Blair Witch sequel, a Netflix adaptation of Death Note and then, with a combined budget of about $300m to play with, two Godzilla vs Kong films. He did an excellent job with the first and a so-so one with the second, perhaps reflecting his growing frustration with the limitations of wrangling franchise IP and after bowing out of more studio fare (he reportedly turned down Face/Off 2), he’s gone back to basics.
He calls his new film Onslaught “an A-plus B-movie” because he tried to deliver all of the gonzo fun of a B-movie but with the A polish he’s learned in recent years. I’d call it a B-minus success, Wingard certainly showcasing that polish (a movie that looks like an actual movie is something to be cherished in 2026) but not quite giving us enough of the raucous fun we were promised. There’s something strangely restrained and at times a little tame, as if he’s still haunted by the ghosts of Warner Bros execs peering over his shoulder and restraint isn’t really what you want in an action slasher about genetically engineered super soldiers …
The film imagines what would happen if an unstoppable Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees type was created and weaponised by the government (the first wink, wink scene has a line of Halloween pumpkins getting obliterated). Evil German doctor Hans Kammler (Wingard regu…