Moriarty, New Mexico, is a real place—a tiny city, with a population of just a couple thousand, that’s part of the greater Albuquerque area. Its city website advertises the upcoming Pinto Bean Fiesta. For some reason, though, writer-director Adam Wingard has chosen Moriarty as the epicenter of an ongoing military-industrial action-horror nightmare. First it was where David (Dan Stevens), a military medical experiment gone wrong, infiltrated and partially destroyed a grieving family in The Guest; now, it’s the target of bigger, badder, more slasher-y experiments in Onslaught, a companion piece with more firepower and somewhat less psychosocial acuity.
It’s helpful to think of Onslaught as horror, even as Wingard sends intentionally mixed signals. The movie opens with Celeste (Adria Arjona), an Army veteran, performing some big-gun target practice on a series of jack-o’-lantern on the grounds of the trailer park she manages. It’s the last time the movie shows any hint of Halloween (The Guest was also set around that holiday despite not being traditionally haunted-house spooky), but wrecked pumpkins juxtaposed with an Albertus (or Albertus-like) credits font like the one favored by John Carpenter can’t help but bring to mind the famous Carpenter-originated slasher series. Recasting the slasher figure as a trio of muscled-up super-soldiers, the personified military industry run amok, recalls the horror undertones of a certain 1984 James Cameron classic about another form of relentless pursuit. Call this Terminator III: Season Of The Witch.
Does that raise expectations too high for a movie that’s also more or less an Assault On Precinct 13 knockoff with a less urban setting, which brings it back around to knocking off the Western Rio Bravo? Maybe. There’s something both endearing and lightly frustrating about the amount of world-building Wingard puts into the opening half-hour and change of Onslaught. The first order of business is to bring back The Guest‘s Dan Stevens in a different part: A German scientist who is gung-ho about fine-tuning these super-soldiers and whose forbidding wife is played by fellow Wingard alum Rebecca Hall. (They both committed to the silliness of Wingard’s bigger-canvas genre-masher, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire.) Before getting into the specifics of a privately contracted program designed to make nigh-unstoppable but technically human killing machines, Wingard sets aside a little time for Stevens and Hall to act out some kind of psychosexual relationship in the key of sci-fi camp. Later, another character is introduced by chronicling his interruption from a planned evening at a sex club. (Moriarty contains multitudes.)
Maybe it’s churlish to complain about a kinky-hotness surplus in an R-rated project that successfully evokes plenty of vintage ’80s pulp. But it’s hard not to look at these moments and think, “What does this have to do with Adria Arjona?” Her Celeste, scruffily dressed and often armed to the teeth, makes for a thought-provoking variation on the usual single mom threatened by a potential custody battle. When her ex-husband surprise-drops their daughter Daisy (Blake Kennedy) off for an unplanned weekend with mom, Celeste seems genuinely halting in how to approach her own child. Arjona and Wingard give the impression that Celeste has been hiding out from polite society since her military days, more comfortable with the cash-poor but mostly good-hearted riff-raff populating the trailer park, including a sloppy, annoying cop (Eric Wareheim) and a wry fellow vet (Reginald VelJohnson). Outside of this, despite repeated black-and-white combat flashbacks, there isn’t much room to explore her character. But before long, three hulking soldiers break out of their test facility and make a beeline for Moriarty. Celeste must therefore spring into military-trained action to defend her neighbors and daughter.
Simple stuff, yet Wingard devotes a lot of time upfront to unnecessarily re-explaining the concept of super-soldiers at length. (They’re silent, masked, tactically minded, and hard to kill. We get it.) Even once the rampage has begun, he introduces the pale clean-up man Cyrus (Drew Starkey) with the apparent belief that if one somewhat effete, Eurotrashy villain leaves the picture, another must take his place. Again, this is at least as endearing as it is annoying, because performers like Starkey, Stevens, and Hall are clearly here to play. It also looks great: Wingard and cinematographer Oren Soffer shoot the hell out of the carnage with celluloid-like texture and contrast. They capture the white-fluorescent glow of an overlit truck stop, the foggy eeriness of the approaching super-slashers, and the stylized neon-red interiors of various vehicles; Onslaught is a consistent pleasure to actually look at, and there’s scarcely a moment where it fails to entertain.
There’s also a glimmer of resonance in its conception of slashers as mass shooters—in their masked silence, not to mention their backup use of a machete and a chainsaw, these soldiers are certainly meant to double as Jason/Leatherface types. When the soldiers take on the aforementioned truck stop, the well-lit, plain-sight slaughter is genuinely chilling, and the movie also lightly subverts the presumption that Celeste’s war chest will serve as a supply reserve for the “good guy with a gun” narrative without undermining Arjona’s considerable movie-star charisma. (She even gets her own version of the Rambo bandana.) There’s enough here that’s both gnarly and thorny enough to undermine the movie’s admirable tightness; by its concise ending (it’s only 92 minutes), the movie hasn’t fully paid off all of that bonkers set-up.
To be clear, Wingard and screenwriter Simon Barrett don’t stop on a shameless to-be-continued tease (though some end-credits stills hint at how the story could spawn its own ’80s-style sequel), and this is an exciting, muscular retro slasher stocked with fun performances. But The Guest played at least a little bit like action-horror pulp was invading a version of the real world, whether or not it resembled the actual city of Moriarty. Onslaught technically expands that movie’s world, yet it also cuts its human interest down to a couple acres of dusty trailer park. That change makes for a fine action-horror-Western showdown in the moment. It just doesn’t offer much space for the movie to linger.
Director: Adam Wingard
Writer: Simon Barrett
Starring: Adria Arjona, Reginald VelJohnson, Dan Stevens, Blake Kennedy, Alex Pereira, Drew Starkey
Release Date: September 4, 2026
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