A New Action Superstar Is Born in Guns-Blazing ‘Onslaught’

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/A24 The Guest wasn’t just Godzilla vs.

Kong director Adam Wingard’s best film.

It was an ‘80s-cinema throwback that, eschewing homage-y kitsch, authentically channeled the era’s particular brand of sleazy, sadistic, silly madness.

Now, Wingard has delivered a kindred-spirit splatterfest of epically badass proportions—with an unforgettable performance at its center.

Onslaught (September 4, in theaters) doesn’t reference 2014’s The Guest, and it features that predecessor’s star, Dan Stevens, in a completely different role.

Yet given that its tale also concerns ex-army members, covert government programs on servicemen, and an avalanche of carnage, it’s clear that the two exist in the same universe—a bond strengthened by the pair’s shared affinity for all-out violent mayhem, which in this case revolves around a PTSD-afflicted single mother played, in an awesomely rugged and commanding performance, by Andor star Adria Arjona.

Onslaught opens to the sound of thunderous gunshots, all of them fired by Celeste (Arjona) at a collection of jack o’ lanterns lined up for target practice in the middle of the desert.

Celeste manages a dusty trailer park whose residents include friendly Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) and rent-deficient cop Kovacks (Eric Wareheim).

When she’s not shooting her weapons, the lonely woman is cleaning them in her unkempt home, whose walls are decorated with medals and photographs that are directly related to the wartime flashbacks (spied in slow-motion black-and-white fragments) that plague her damaged mind.

As Celeste tends to her nondescript domicile, German scientist Dr.

Hans Kammler (Stevens)—a bald weirdo who has one milky eye and wears an all-white suit and matching cape—licks the high-heeled shoe of his wife Hanna (Rebecca Hall) before being spirited away by helicopter, blindfolded, to an Area 51-esque subterranean research facility.

There, he’s transforming a trio of the worst that the U.S.

Armed Forces has to offer into super soldiers programmed to kill without hesitation or conscience.

Decked out in heavy gear, their faces covered by dark masks and paint to make their glowing eyes stand out, they’re a silent and deadly threesome, and during a drill, they prove to Kammler and military envoy Baylor (Michael Biehn) that they’re scarily ready for duty.