‘Onslaught’ Review: Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens in Adam Wingard Thriller

If nothing else, Onslaught stands as proof that director Adam Wingard, making his way back to lean, mean originals after a decade in the IP mines, hasn’t lost his touch for the sort of deliciously vivid details that suggest motherlodes of stories unto themselves.

In the first few minutes alone, we get grinning jack-o’-lanterns lined up in a dusty canyon, exploding one by one in target practice. A knife slicing through gnarled, unpeeled carrots that look like nothing so much as human fingers. An ancient Nazi scientist (Dan Stevens) crawling across a carpet to lick a woman’s stilettoed foot.

Each image lands as a promise — an amuse-bouche for the veritable feast of ultraviolence sure to come once all these disparate elements start to crash and burn into one another. But building anticipatory buzz is one thing; paying it off is another. Gloriously crafted if narratively undercooked, the action-thriller is a pretty good time. It’s just that it had seemed for a moment like it was going to be a great one.

The pumpkin shooter turns out to be Celeste (Adria Arjona), a former Army sniper with the shaky hands, extensive gun collection and dirty-dish-filled sink of someone barely keeping it together. Wracked with PTSD, she’s retreated in her civilian life into a remote desert trailer park populated by other mild eccentrics who seem more comfortable removed from the rest of the world, including a kindly Vietnam vet (Reginald VelJohnson as Josiah) and a bitter drunk of a cop (Eric Wareheim as Kovacks).

But the relative safety of Windy Oasis is violated when a trio of super-soldiers escape from a top-secret military bunker up the road. As these experiments, described to one eager businessman as “the human equivalent of heat-seeking missiles,” close in, Celeste must take up arms to protect herself, her young daughter (Blake Kennedy’s Daisy) and her community.

In other words: Expect a home invasion thriller, of the sort Wingard made his name on in 2011’s You’re Next and 2014’s The Guest. On that front, Onslaught delivers well enough. Between the soldiers’ imperviousness to bullets, immunity to pain and indifference to conscience, it doesn’t take long before they rack up a body count in the dozens — chopping through walls and punching through windows and blowing off heads with cold, mechanical relentlessness.

Fine craftsmanship can be seen on every level of the action. Nick Interlandi’s soundscapes swell with the rat-a-tat of machine guns, or zero in on the precise, satisfying crunch of glass cracking under bone, while Oren Soffer’s cinematography runs the gamut from sickly clinical to startlingly sensual.

And yet, the second half of the movie can’t feel like something of a letdown — as if Wingard, having shown us all the cool shiny toys he has at his disposal, has forgotten to come up with anything to do with them beyond smash them together.

Stevens’ Kammler makes a big immediate impression as a pervy little freak, but then gets less room than you might hope to swan around in his snow-white capes. Rebecca Hall, playing his elegantly domineering wife, gets even less. Deep into the second act, Drew Starkey has an all-timer of an intro as elite operative Cyrus, the camera practically caressing his bare torso as he rolls on molly and ogles G-string-clad women in a sex club. But I’d be hard-pressed to say what the character actually accomplishes beyond stand around various scenes of carnage; at one point, in fact, he’s explicitly instructed not to do anything at all.

The political themes hinted at by the opening collage — clips of robot soldiers and photos of Abu Ghraib torture victims and headlines about the U.S. embrace of Nazi scientists after World War II, all conspiring to remind us that the American military has always been capable of profound horror — never completely fade from view. But they never really get fleshed out any further, either. The potential to tap into the ambient paranoia of our current militarized age goes unfulfilled.

What Onslaught does remember to develop are the good guys, far less colorful than the villains but, in their down-to-earth relatability, no less compelling. Celeste should be another feather in the cap for Arjona, a wonderfully versatile actor who’s been steadily on the rise for the past few years. Here, she gets to glower and shoot and make a bloody mess with the best of the action-hero badasses. But she also gets to demonstrate the humor and warmth that’s made her such a delight in films like Hit-Man.

She’s especially winsome in her scenes with Josiah, the two grizzled vets teasing each other or coming to each other’s aid with the unspoken kinship that comes from shared experience. It’s his unassuming decency, even more than Daisy’s sweet innocence or Celeste’s mama-bear toughness, that makes Windy Oasis feel like a world worth saving. One only wishes the film could have done the same while also making a fully satisfying meal of the cartoonish villains who’ve come to destroy them.