‘ONSLAUGHT’ turns veteran exploitation into a blood-soaked throwback

“Never pick a fight with someone who has more to lose than you do.”

A24’s ONSLAUGHT released this past weekend, marking Adam Wingard’s triumphant — and appropriately blood-soaked — return to the kind of John Carpenter-inspired, ’80s throwback filmmaking that first made him such an exciting genre director.

It has been nearly a decade since Wingard disappeared into the machinery of franchise filmmaking, directing projects like Netflix’s Death Note and Warner Bros./Legendary’s Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

With ONSLAUGHT, he gets nasty again.

The gritty horror-actioner follows Celeste (Adria Arjona), a former Army sniper who finds herself defending her daughter and the residents of her rural New Mexico trailer park from a trio of deranged, bloodthirsty super soldiers.

It’s a wonderfully simple pitch — essentially a straightforward siege movie — but underneath all the bullets, blood and carnage is a surprisingly thoughtful examination of how the United States treats its veterans and, more broadly, the people its institutions claim to protect.

At a mysterious black site in the desert, genetic scientist Dr. Hans Kammler (Dan Stevens) is a third-generation “Paperclip” scientist, descended from the legacy of the real-life post-World War II Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazi scientists to the United States to work on government programs.

At the behest of private investors, Kammler believes he has perfected the ultimate super soldier.

His process involves bringing dead combat veterans back to life, programming them, stripping away their humanity and transforming them into nearly unstoppable machines designed to combat domestic threats.

Kammler’s wife, Hanna (Rebecca Hall), points out the obvious problem their creations are intended to solve: In the event of a domestic uprising, ordinary American soldiers might hesitate before killing their own countrymen.

These soldiers don’t.

Crybaby, Cockroach and The Butcher are decked out in black combat gear and war paint and armed to the teeth. What little humanity remains is obscured behind the eerie electronic glow of their pupils, turning three badass military silhouettes into leering nightmares.

Their programming is brutally simple:

Kill until there’s nothing left.

When the soldiers break free from the laboratory, they begin moving toward Celeste’s trailer park, leaving bodies and destruction in their wake.

Hot on their trail is Cyrus (Drew Starkey), a mysterious government agent ordered to contain the situation or, failing that, simply observe what happens.

That leaves Celeste with one objective: protect her family and survive the night.

To stop a killing machine, she has to become one.

ONSLAUGHT exists in a wonderfully grimy world of paranoia and conspiracy, establishing its tone from the opening credits. Wingard begins with President Barack Obama criticizing “stupid” wars before dialing history backward through archival material dealing with Operation Paperclip, Nazi scientists and human experimentation.

From the beginning, Wingard wants us thinking about the relationship between government, war and the people fed into both.

Thankfully, he doesn’t use those ideas as an excuse to turn Celeste into a spotless symbol of American veterans. She is a mess.

In many ways, Celeste feels like a gender-swapped version of the working-class everyman protagonists who once dominated this kind of action movie. You could easily imagine a young Bruce Willis playing some variation of this character 30 or 40 years ago.

A former soldier, Celeste now makes her living running a trailer park in the middle of nowhere. She is fiercely protective of her daughter but hardly a picture-perfect parent.

Early in the film, she butts heads with her daughter’s father, a former Marine who has since remarried and built a considerably more conventional life. He is considering moving across the country and, at his wife’s urging, threatens legal action if Celeste refuses to cooperate with the custody situation.

Celeste, meanwhile, lives in relative squalor. She drinks too much. She has a temper. She doesn’t trust easily.

And she has enough guns and weapons stashed in her trailer to supply a small militia.

Arjona completely kills it. You believe Celeste has seen some shit. More importantly, you believe she came home carrying pieces of it with her.

There’s a fractured quality to Arjona’s performance that keeps Celeste from becoming another invincible action heroine. She is capable because of her past, but she is also damaged by it. The same experiences that make her uniquely equipped to survive the nightmare coming toward her are responsible for many of the problems already consuming her life.

She isn’t a squeaky-clean protagonist. That alone feels refreshing.

Reginald VelJohnson plays Josiah, the closest thing Celeste has to a friend. A resident of her trailer park and veteran of the Vietnam War, Josiah provides an interesting counterpoint to Celeste.

The movie only lightly explores it, but there is something fascinating in the contrast between veterans from two different generations and the ways they have learned to live with what happened to them.

Josiah comes from a generation of Vietnam veterans who returned home to a country deeply divided over the war. Decades later, he has seemingly made his peace with the world. He reads his library books, keeps to himself and takes life largely as it comes.

Celeste is different. She is perpetually on edge, suspicious of nearly everyone and seemingly always waiting for the next fight.

The movie never stops to deliver a speech explaining that contrast. It doesn’t need to. Putting the two characters beside one another says plenty.

When the super soldiers get their first real taste of domestic combat at a local truck stop, the movie changes.

Up to that point, Crybaby, Cockroach and The Butcher possess the sort of exaggerated cool that makes them immediately memorable genre villains. Their gear is stylish. Their glowing eyes look incredible. Their entire presentation practically begs to become an action figure.

Then they start killing civilians.

Wingard depicts the resulting violence with an ugliness that deliberately drains much of the fun out of it. The sequence evokes uncomfortable images of real-world mass violence without transforming the carnage into spectacle for spectacle’s sake.

Suddenly, these three cool-looking monsters aren’t cool anymore. They’re terrifying.

And the underlying question becomes difficult to ignore: What happens when the machinery built to protect a population is deliberately turned against it?

That is where Celeste becomes such an effective counterpoint to the soldiers hunting her.

All four characters are products of war. All four know how to kill. 

But Crybaby, Cockroach and The Butcher have had everything else taken from them. Whatever people they once were have been erased until violence is no longer something they do.

Violence is all they are. Celeste has every reason to end up the same way. She hasn’t.

War has clearly damaged her. Her civilian life is dysfunctional. Her relationships are strained. She is angry, distrustful and sometimes self-destructive.

But it hasn’t managed to erase the thing at her core that sent her into the military in the first place. She is a protector.

When violence arrives at her doorstep, she doesn’t fight because somebody programmed her to do it. She fights because there are people behind her who cannot fight for themselves.

That distinction gives ONSLAUGHT considerably more thematic weight than its delightfully trashy premise would suggest.

Starkey’s mysterious Cyrus adds another wrinkle.

He initially appears to be exactly what you expect from this kind of movie: the handsome, emotionally detached government operative dispatched to clean up someone else’s mess.

Instead, Starkey brings an unexpected humanity to him.

Cyrus does his job, but he clearly has reservations about the people responsible for the project. His discomfort with the continued use of the Paperclip scientists is apparent, and despite the organization employing him, he seems genuinely disturbed by the innocent people caught in the path of its experiment.

Wingard repeatedly brushes against larger political and institutional ideas without ever stopping the movie to tell the audience precisely what it should think about them.

That restraint works. Because the central horror is potent enough on its own: veterans stripped of their humanity and repurposed as weapons against the very people they once served to protect — an idea so grotesque that, within the film, it literally comes from the mind of a Nazi scientist.

And Celeste is their perfect opposite.

The violence she experienced in war has damaged her, but it hasn’t erased what she is at her core.

Crybaby, Cockroach and The Butcher have been reduced to weapons. Celeste still gets to choose what she fights for. That is the beating heart beneath all the carnage.

And somehow, amid all of this, ONSLAUGHT also manages to be a tremendously badass action-horror movie.

Wingard’s return to smaller-scale genre filmmaking is grimy, nasty, stylish and refreshingly mean. It recalls an era when these movies were allowed to have rough edges — when they could be sleazy and provocative and occasionally unpleasant without sanding themselves down into something designed to offend absolutely no one.

ONSLAUGHT has something on its mind, but it never forgets what kind of movie it is.

Sometimes you want an action movie to wrestle with veterans, institutional power and what happens when governments begin viewing human beings as disposable tools.

And sometimes you just want to watch Adria Arjona pick up a gun and fight three seemingly unstoppable monsters.

Turns out, you can have both.