Onslaught

 Force, and its instrument, violence, make right; power, and its tool, violence. 

Ursula K. Le Guin 

There is a woman in Onslaught who bears little resemblance to the heroines action cinema has accustomed us to. 

Like Arlen in The Bad Batch, Celeste is not elegant, not disciplined, not particularly reassuring. She is a former Army sniper, lives in a trailer in the New Mexico desert, has a hidden arsenal, a military past that continues to resurface in her body and memory, and a seven-year-old daughter whom she deeply loves, even though she is far from certain that she knows how to be a mother. 

It is precisely this imperfection that makes her interesting. 

Adam Wingard constructs Onslaught as a genre film openly indebted to the action and horror cinema of the 1980s: three genetically modified supersoldiers escape from a secret military facility and turn a trailer community into a hunting ground. Celeste, who had tried to leave the war behind, is forced to take up arms again to protect Daisy. All of it unfolds to the overwhelming leading protagonist: Matthew Pusti’s score. 

The premise might seem like yet another variation on the final girl: the apparently vulnerable woman who, when the masculine world of violence bursts into her life, discovers that she is stronger than her killers. 

But Celeste is something more ambiguous, and therefore more interesting. 

Cinema has often asked women to choose a precise form of femininity in order to become protagonists. 

A woman can be independent, provided she is impeccable; she can be a mother, provided she is nurturing; she can be a warrior, provided she is trained, disciplined, almost masculine. Celeste, however, fits none of these categories. 

She loves Daisy, but she does not always know how to be there for her. Her daughter is not simply the center of her existence: she is also something that unsettles her, reopens wounds, and forces her to confront a part of herself from which she had tried to escape. 

Adria Arjona has portrayed Celeste precisely through this contradiction: a woman who deeply loves her daughter but is not “ready” to be a mother. It is anything but a secondary detail. 

Because Onslaught does not portray motherhood as perfection: it portrays it as a responsibility that arrives even when we are not ready, and in this case it does not erase the woman who existed before. 

Celeste remains angry, disordered, traumatized, sexual, imperfect, even selfish. She does not stop being a person in order to become a mother, and when she has to protect Daisy, she does not magically transform into the “good mother.” 

She becomes something much more primordial: a woman defending what she loves. 

And this is where the feminine dimension of Onslaught acquires a political dimension. 

On one side there is Celeste; on the other, the supersoldiers. They seem to belong to two incompatible universes, but in reality they have something in common: both are bodies subjected to war. 

Celeste has been trained; the supersoldiers have been modified. 

She has been transformed into a fighting machine through military discipline, they through biological experimentation. 

The difference is that Celeste can still escape her function: she can choose; the supersoldiers cannot. 

They have been constructed so that function coincides with their very existence: power has taken the human body and attempted to eliminate everything that might make it unpredictable — feelings such as fear, empathy, hesitation, freedom… preserving only efficiency. 

It is the dream of every totalitarian system: a body that no longer needs to be persuaded to obey because it has been built to obey. 

And this is where Onslaught becomes, almost inadvertently, a film about our present. 

Not because it directly addresses artificial intelligence: it does not, and it would be incorrect to attribute such an intention to it. But because it imagines the same technological obsession that runs through our time: separating a capability from the human being who possesses it, turning intelligence into performance, the body into an instrument, decision into procedure. 

The supersoldier is a human being who has been stripped of the possibility of being anything else. 

Celeste, by contrast, is a woman who still retains the possibility of change. 

It is significant that this possibility passes precisely through her relationship with a child. Daisy is not simply “the daughter to be saved,” but what prevents Celeste from reducing herself once again to her military identity. Her daughter forces her to remember that there is something that cannot be measured in terms of efficiency. 

A human being is not a target but another human being, and that is precisely what power cannot manufacture. 

The laboratory can modify the body, enhance it, make it more resistant, faster, more lethal, but it cannot produce a relationship, it cannot program love, it cannot construct that form of responsibility that arises from recognizing in the other something that does not belong to us. At least for now… and even then, it would be something programmed. 

The difference is that Celeste can still choose; the supersoldiers cannot: their function coincides with their identity. 

In this sense, Daisy is almost the antithesis of the laboratory: the laboratory produces bodies. Motherhood produces relationship. And that is a political difference before it is a sentimental one. 

There is also something the film grants Celeste that cinema has often denied women: anger without justification. 

Celeste does not have to be likable, nor necessarily composed; she can be angry, vulgar, aggressive, armed, unpredictable. She can be a mother and, at the same time, fail to correspond to the reassuring image of motherhood. 

Perhaps this is the most interesting form of femininity in Onslaught: not the woman who conquers a traditionally masculine role, but the woman who refuses to be reduced to a single definition. 

Mother and fighter, fragile and ferocious, nurturing and violent, imperfect and responsible: there is no need to choose. 

And this is precisely where Celeste’s character approaches the tradition of the great action heroines — from Ripley onward — but with an important difference: her strength does not erase her vulnerability. Wingard has explicitly cited Sigourney Weaver and Ripley as references for the character. 

But Celeste’s true antagonist, in the end, is not even the supersoldier, but the system that produced him. 

Because the three masked men crossing the desert, killing without hesitation, are merely the final product of a much larger machine. 

The film thus pushes to an extreme one of the oldest forms of contemporary fear: power entering the body: a power that commands and modifies, surveils, designs, constructs, determines. 

Onslaught is not merely a film about supersoldiers but a reflection, albeit an uneven one, on freedom. 

Because Celeste’s freedom does not consist in not being violent, but in being able to choose why to be violent. That is the abyss between a machine and a person. 

The feminine dimension of Onslaught, then, does not lie merely in having a female protagonist; it lies in defending a body that refuses to coincide with the function assigned to it. 

For centuries, the female body has been disciplined, controlled, judged, desired, reproduced, medicalized, protected and violated. The film transfers this history into the language of action: Celeste’s body is simultaneously that of a mother, a soldier, a survivor, a woman. 

None of these identities can fully contain it. Celeste does not become free when she becomes stronger. 

She becomes free when she stops coinciding with the definition someone else has given her. 

The military defined her as a soldier; motherhood could define her solely as a mother; society could define her as a traumatized woman. Instead, the film gives her back the most difficult possibility: to be all these things without being reducible to any one of them. 

Perhaps that is why her most important weapon is not the rifle, but the possibility of choosing. 

The laboratory can build the perfect body for war, create the perfect soldier, eliminate fear, program violence, but there is one thing power, at least as long as it remains human, cannot completely manufacture: a woman who can still decide who she is. 

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
— Audre Lorde