‘Onslaught’ Is A24’s Latest Sci-Fi Gamble, and Rotten Tomatoes Score Suggests It’s Paying Off

A24 has built its reputation on genre films that don’t play by conventional Hollywood rules, and its next release is leaning fully into that identity. The studio has spent recent months rolling out increasingly chaotic trailers for a project that blends survival horror, sci-fi and pure action into one relentless package.

That film is ‘Onslaught‘, directed by Adam Wingard and written by longtime collaborator Simon Barrett, the same creative duo behind ‘You’re Next’ and ‘The Guest’. Wingard has described the project as the unofficial closing chapter of a loose trilogy alongside those two earlier films, sharing the same world and building on ideas introduced in ‘The Guest’, even while insisting it isn’t a direct sequel following the same characters.

Ahead of its release, ‘Onslaught’ has already started drawing genuinely strong reviews, currently sitting at 79 percent on the Tomatometer across nineteen critic reviews. That’s a solid early showing for a genre film built around gonzo action and horror elements, suggesting Wingard’s blend of tones is landing with critics ahead of its wide theatrical debut.

At the center of the story is Adria Arjona, playing Celeste, a former Army sniper who’s left the battlefield behind to raise her young daughter in a remote desert trailer park. That fragile peace gets shattered when a classified military experiment goes catastrophically wrong, unleashing a trio of genetically engineered super soldiers, nicknamed Crybaby, Cockroach and The Butcher, who escape a secret facility and threaten everything Celeste has tried to build.

Arjona is joined by an ensemble that includes Dan Stevens, Rebecca Hall, Drew Starkey, Michael Biehn, Eric Wareheim, Reginald VelJohnson and UFC fighter Alex Pereira. That mix of established genre veterans and newer faces gives ‘Onslaught’ a wide net to work with as it balances its horror-tinged action beats against the more grounded family stakes at the film’s core.

The film’s marketing has leaned hard into its unhinged tone, with trailers showcasing explosive gunfights, brutal hand-to-hand combat and large-scale destruction as Celeste’s quiet desert life collides with the escaped super soldiers. Early footage has also teased ominous military activity looming over the area well before the threat fully reveals itself, building tension around what exactly the government facility was hiding.

‘Onslaught’ opens exclusively in theaters and IMAX on September 4, arriving in what’s shaping up to be a genuinely crowded late-summer release weekend, with roughly eleven other films also debuting the same day. Since it’s a theatrical A24 release, there’s no day-and-date streaming option, meaning fans will need to catch it on the big screen before any eventual digital rollout arrives.

With strong critical buzz already building and a marketing campaign that’s leaned all the way into its chaotic premise, ‘Onslaught’ looks positioned to be one of A24’s more ambitious action swings yet.

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