Adam Wingard‘s films are not subtle. I’m not saying he’s incapable of subtlety, and his films certainly contain nuance and enough muscularity to their storytelling that you can generally spend a good bit of time analyzing the breadth of what they’re saying, but this is the guy best known to mainstream audiences for having King Kong make a big axe out of one of Godzilla’s back spikes. His movies glory in big, broad, hyperreal moments like that, but he doesn’t need a massive budget to pull those moments off.
Wingard’s latest film, Onslaught, is certainly the least subtle variation on a theme that also runs through You’re Next and The Guest, films connected by a shared world and occasional shared geography as well as the thematic tissue which binds them all. Backed by a pulsing synth score and inspired by filmmakers like John Carpenter and James Cameron, Wingard and his writing partner Simon Barrett go for the gusto with this one, setting up the narrative skeleton in such a way that it all builds to one massive, gore-streaked battle in the desert. It’s right there in the name.
This is a cinematic attack.
But it’s also the final, swagger-laden installment in a trio of Wingard films that, while they each traffic in other subgenres, could be described as Military Horror. For more than a decade now, Wingard’s played in this space, exploring all the ways in which the necessary evils of war can be spun into new horrors on the home front. Together they present America through the lens of a military industrial meat grinder, and they put all of us in its teeth.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for You’re Next, The Guest, and Onslaught.
You’re Next Turns Military Wealth Into Family Horror
We begin with the most subtle application of this idea in Wingard’s arsenal. You’re Next has perhaps the most straightforward plot of any of these three films, basically an excuse for second and third acts filled with inventive bloodshed. A rich family gathers at their country home for a weekend getaway, and masked killers who seem to know just how rich they are start picking them off one by one. There are a million different ways this story could spin, all of them springing from that same straightforward idea, but what makes You’re Next especially potent is where all that wealth comes from.
Paul Davison (Rob Moran) made his money as a military contractor, working for the same shadowy company that appears in both The Guest and Onslaught as an increasingly major player. When Paul’s children set out to take hold of that fortune, conspiring to stage the whole thing as an elaborate mass murder, they do so with many of the same tools and tactics that Paul’s clients no doubt deployed, unleashing absolutely brutality on everyone in their path until they’re stopped by an unexpected wild card, Sharni Vinson‘s Erin.
The military aspects of the whole thing largely exist as background in the story, but it’s hard to ignore just how much this film is the story of a family that made its fortune on bloodshed, fighting over that fortune with yet more bloodshed. The American aristocracy is shot through with this kind of brutal moral pollution, and in You’re Next it comes back to bite them.
The Guest Disguises a Military Weapon as the Perfect American Hero
If You’re Next is about the merciless hoarding and squabbling over military-industrial wealth, then The Guest is about what people like Paul Davison created, which allowed them to become wealthy. The film’s great master stroke is the casting of Dan Stevens, fresh off his time in Downton Abbey, as David, a very nice young man who also happens to be a killing machine. David arrives on the scene far removed from the trappings of wealth we saw with the Davison family, jogging down a desert road with practiced ease, stopping in just to tell the family of one of his brothers in arms that he cares about them, and that their lost son and brother wanted him to pass along a message of love.
When he first emerges, with his bright eyes and his million-dollar smile and his easy, lithe way of moving through the world, he’s an almost literal golden boy, the kind of soldier you’d want to meet. Watch the opening scene of The Guest, and you see David Collins as the platonic ideal of an American military man.
The trick of the story, of course, is that David perhaps was that person once, but not anymore. The subtleties lurking within The Guest‘s story of a super soldier gone AWOL and, finally, haywire, are layered into Barrett’s script and given form through Stevens’ eyes. The more we learn about David, the more we understand that all of his cold-bloodedness, all of his casual violence might have been an innate part of his personality before, but was more likely forced on him through brainwashing.
He is an asset, a product, a former human being engineered to kill, and we can never truly know how much of his brutality is nature or nurture.
Stevens’ performances keeps that ambiguity right at the forefront of the film, creating a character who’s both a product of the military-industrial complex and a participant in it, and we can’t see where the line is. When his wrath comes, it comes not against the wealthy and powerful, but against a working class family and the people around them, a military family who gave up a son just like his family did. If the meat grinder of Wingard’s world can’t chew you up, it will just make you part of the machinery.
Onslaught Completes Adam Wingard’s Military Horror Trilogy
Which brings us, finally, to Onslaught, the least subtle and the most brutal of these films, in which nearly every major character is either part of the meat grinder or trying to escape it after their own time served in its constantly spinning blades. Celeste (Adria Arjona) and her neighbor Josiah (Reginald VelJohnson) are veterans, living at or near the poverty line in the middle of nowhere, just trying to savor the simple pleasures they have left, be it cigarettes or headphones blaring a vinyl collection. The families they had are in pieces, and in Celeste’s case (probably Josiah’s too), life is clouded with bad dreams and troubling memories.
They are the leftovers of old wars, a pair of John Rambo types just trying to find a measure of peace.
What Wingard and Barrett pit against them is not wearing a human face, or if it is, it’s the face of a third-generation Nazi mad scientist (Stevens again) who’s long since gone mad with power and a desire to perfect the destructive forces of his forebears. It’s no accident that Onslaught‘s opening credits take us back through the American Century, all the way to World War II, to chart a course of people who decided the best way to prevent a global conflict like that from ever happening again was to build increasingly insidious killing machines.
The product of that drive this time is barely recognizable: a trio of relentless killers who don’t feel pain, don’t stop, and don’t care that they’re attacking innocent people, let alone fellow soldiers. In Onslaught, the villains might not be the ultimate expression of military-industrial greed, but they are among the most garish and repellent.
As I said, these aren’t subtle movies, and what’s especially striking about their thematic connections is how they get less subtle over time, not more. Some of that is Wingard’s natural inclination toward big effects, big weapons, and big kills, but I suspect it also has a lot to do with the way the world seems to have grown colder in the time since You’re Next arrived in theaters. Wingard and Barrett haven’t just been off making other movies; they’ve been existing in the same world we have, one of increasingly troubling wars and brinksmanship and a need by those with the most to dominate those with the least.
The meat grinder Wingard sees in his films has only grown in that time, gained more teeth, a wider mouth, a sharper cut. That’s why Onslaught works as a piece of military horror, and it’s why these films are linked. When you take them together, they are an indictment of our seemingly endless appetite for sanctioned violence in all its forms, while also being damn entertaining action-horror vehicles worth watching over and over again.
