Adam Wingard

A Wingard film announces itself early. There is a synth line under the titles, a figure alone in a building, and the sense that a John Carpenter film from around 1980 is being remembered with affection. Onslaught (2026) does it in minutes: one woman, one building, one night of men who want to get in. The set-up is quick and confident and it makes a promise. Keeping the promise is where Wingard's trouble usually starts.

He began small, in low-budget horror between about 2007 and 2011, with Pop Skull and A Horrible Way to Die, and found his footing when the writer Simon Barrett found him. You're Next (2013) was the home-invasion thriller that got them noticed, and The Guest (2014) is the one people still bring up, with Dan Stevens at his best for Wingard. Then came other people's material, Blair Witch (2016) and Death Note (2017), neither warmly received, and after those the monsters: Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024). Onslaught is his way back down to the ground. Barrett has now written eight films for him, and Wingard's reputation rests on the ones where the two of them were left alone with a genre and not much money.

What he does well is the set-piece and the quick sketch. Kong, alone for long stretches of Godzilla x Kong without a line of dialogue, is the best thing in that film, and Wingard plainly enjoys him. The first act of Onslaught lays out a conspiracy, a doctor and his wife, and the men who will spend the night in and around the building, and it does so briskly and well. What he does less well is wait. In Godzilla x Kong the humans keep coming back to read out the plot, and the film sags every time they do; it is good fun for about a third of its 115 minutes. In Onslaught the assault arrives in pieces, a burst of violence, a pause for someone to explain, another burst, and Josh Schaeffer and Adam Avery cut the pauses as fast as the fights. We sat there wanting to be frightened and were mildly irritated instead, because a siege lives on what is outside the door, and Wingard kept cutting away from it.

The actors suffer for the same reason. Stevens, so good in The Guest, has a title and a suit to play in Onslaught; Rebecca Hall has less; Alex Pereira's Butcher is a large man who hits things and nothing more. The monster films at least knew that nobody had come for the people. Wingard has said his heart lies in the 1980s and John Carpenter, and we believe him. What we would pay to see next is a Wingard film that dares to be quiet for ten minutes. Everything else, he can already do.