Onslaught, the new Adam Wingard action horror starring Adria Arjona and Dan Stevens, hit cinemas on Friday, 4 September 2026, and the first reviews are not being kind to the plot.
Critics have spent the week circling the same conclusion, that Wingard, who co-wrote the film with Simon Barrett, has built something that looks brilliant and lands soft, as reported by Hollywood Reporter.
The outlet’s verdict fits neatly on a bumper sticker:
“Tons of promise, not quite enough payoff.”
What the ‘Onslaught’ review chorus says about Adria Arjona
Here is the twist. The same reviewers who shrugged at the story would not stop talking about Arjona.
Her exhausted, no-nonsense mother has drawn comparisons to Sigourney Weaver and a modern-day Jamie Lee Curtis, which is the kind of company that turns a jobbing lead into an action star.
Comparisons like those are not thrown around lightly. Weaver and Curtis both built entire careers on playing women who survive the unsurvivable, and pinning that same energy on Arjona suggests she is one good script away from headlining her own franchise rather than someone else’s.
Why the ‘Onslaught’ plot keeps letting the film down
Arjona plays a mother in a trailer park who has to keep her family alive when something nasty escapes a secret military facility nearby.
Dan Stevens rounds out the cast, and between the two of them the film has more acting muscle than its script seems to know what to do with.
The complaints are consistent. Reviewers point to gorgeous visuals, solid action and a cast of serious talent working on fun ideas that never lock together in a satisfying way, while the bloody carnage does little to cover for a plot most called paper thin.
Some found the action inconsistent too.
None of that lands on the cast. The gap reviewers keep describing sits between what the film promises in its first act and what it manages to pay off by the end, which is why the praise and the disappointment can sit in the same paragraph without contradicting each other.
What happens next for ‘Onslaught’ and Adria Arjona
The film is in cinemas, so the opening weekend numbers will settle the argument the reviews could not. Mixed notices rarely stop a horror release, and word of mouth on Arjona’s performance may end up doing more work for ticket sales than any star rating.
The longer game belongs to Arjona. Critics have effectively handed her an audition reel for the next decade of action leads, and if the industry is paying attention, her next script offer will look nothing like the one she just shot.
