Across two seasons of Andor, Adria Arjona carried other people’s grief and took the beatings that came with it. Adam Wingard’s response? Hand her a few guns and let her pull the trigger.
That is the setup for Onslaught, arriving in theaters Sept. 4.
The MonsterVerse guy is going back to what he’s good at
Long before he was piloting the MonsterVerse, Wingard was making horror on shoestring budgets. He gave audiences the matchup they’d been demanding with 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, then came back a few years on with 2024’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Both were popcorn blockbusters assembled around enormous explosive set pieces, the iconic mutant kaiju and everyone’s favorite ape.
Which is why word that he was exiting the franchise landed as a shock. Unless you’d tracked his career from the beginning.
Pre-Godzilla, Wingard honed his instincts on ferocious action and horror — above all You’re Next and The Guest, a pair of films that strand an ordinary family in the path of relentless evil. Onslaught stitches the two halves of his filmography together into an unholy Frankenstein-esque monster.
A sniper, a trailer park and a very bad week
Arjona plays Celeste, an army sniper and single mother in a trailer park who’s scraping together a decent life for her young daughter. Then things get harder. Super soldiers have broken out of a classified military facility, and they intend to track down her family and hurt them.
Why, the trailer never really says. It does describe the super soldiers as the human version of a “heat-seeking missile,” which invites the suspicion that Celeste has something nobody else does.
A24 is producing, and the screenplay comes from Simon Barrett, a repeat Wingard collaborator whose work leans mostly horror. With those two names attached, count on the movie veering somewhere odder than “single mom versus superpowered soldiers” implies.
Dan Stevens calls it a spiritual sequel to The Guest
Recognizable names fill out the ensemble. Dan Stevens appears, as does Rebecca Hall, already a two-time Wingard collaborator via The Guest and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
Joining them: UFC fighters Alex Pereira and Maurice Greene, plus Michael Biehn (The Terminator), Drew Starkey (Love, Simon), Eric Wareheim (Master of None) and Reginald VelJohnson (Die Hard).
Speaking at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year, Stevens dubbed Onslaught a “spiritual sequel” to The Guest, the horror-action title that cemented his reputation with a particular kind of viewer. There, Stevens is U.S. soldier David Collins, who arrives at the Peterson household saying he was friends with their son Caleb, who died fighting in Afghanistan. David is a super soldier, engineered to kill anybody who might expose who he really is.
Ringing any bells?
You don’t need homework for this one
Wingard, also at Comic-Con, confirmed that Onslaught takes place in that same town and hinted that the secret experiments behind David tie into what The Guest laid out. A same-universe sequel? Go ahead and use the label.
Even so, it’s unlikely that any Guest characters show up, so arriving with zero background costs you nothing.
It runs 92 minutes — one hour and 32 minutes — which leaves scarcely enough space to set one single mother against three super soldiers and sell the fight as fair. Working out how Wingard evens those odds is the entire reason to buy a ticket.