UNHINGED (2020) Review
One of the single most terrifying truths that horror movies have explored over the years is that psychopaths don’t really need a very good reason to want to kill you. The masked maniacs in The Strangers, for example, tormented and then ultimately butchered a young couple for no other reason than they were home at the time, the film throwing motive completely out the window to a chillingly extreme degree. In real life as in movies, sometimes you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And sometimes, it can be the most minor of transgressions that make you the target of a madman’s fury.
Something as simple, Unhinged posits, as a little everyday road rage.
Written by Carl Ellsworth and directed by Derrick Borte, Unhinged tells the story of Rachel (Caren Pistorius) and her life-changing run-in with The Man (Russell Crowe), the living, breathing, sweating embodiment of White Male Rage. In a rush to get her young son Kyle (Gabriel Bateman) to school, Rachel leans on the horn while stuck behind The Man at a green light, frustrated that he’s idling at an intersection. When she swerves around him and refuses to apologize, The Man embarks on a brutal quest to show Rachel just how bad a bad day can really get. More specifically, he’s going to kill everyone she cares about. And anyone who gets in the way.
A road rage thriller executed with all the blunt-force simplicity of a slasher movie, Unhinged tells us everything we need to know about The Man in an opening scene that takes place shortly before he becomes a machete-sized thorn in Rachel’s side. Crowe’s character has just killed his ex-wife and her new lover and burned her house to the ground, the movie establishing right off the bat that he’s a time bomb that has already exploded in spectacularly horrifying fashion. Rachel, it’s safe to assume, could’ve just as easily become the next target of his rage if she had asked him to, say, put on a face mask at the local Trader Joe’s during a pandemic. The motive here is a moot point. He’s not looking for a reason to blow up. He’s already there.
With Russell Crowe playing the part, The Man is a terrifying force of nature, the shark from Jaws plucked out of the water and placed behind the wheel of a big ass truck. He’s a horror movie monster stripped free of any fantastical elements, grunting and lumbering about like a grizzly bear who just so happens to be dressed up like a human being for the day. He’s an uncomfortably fitting villain for our current times, an ordinary man who feels wronged by the world and believes he has nothing left to contribute but rage-scream destruction and mass murder. And he seems to be acting, out loud and in public, with impunity. Crowe fills the screen with palpable menace, his presence alone so threatening that he hardly needs to spout any dialogue at all. The Oscar-winning actor seems to delight in playing such an irredeemably bad man, and to the movie’s credit, we’re never asked to sympathize with him. This isn’t the story of a man who’s lost everything and just needs a break. It’s the story of a monster on an absolute warpath.
Carl Ellsworth’s script, which comes to the screen as a taut 80-minute action-horror spectacle with little fat, features some passing bits of social commentary on topics such as aggressive driving, distracted motorists and American rage — most of which is delivered by various news reports over the opening credits that present a world that’s devolved into borderline apocalyptic levels of lawless chaos — but to be clear, Unhinged has little more on its mind than delivering an exploitation thrill ride that’s packed with as much mayhem as possible. The film has a tendency to be explosively violent whenever Crowe is on screen, whether his character is using his truck as a battering ram or his fists like sledgehammers, and the high-octane mind games between Rachel and The Man prove to be pulse-poundingly intense. Their battle, particularly in the final act, reminds a lot of the Ellsworth-penned, Wes Craven-directed Red Eye, both films forcing a good woman to outwit, outplay and outlast a madman. And even if the character is thinly sketched, Caren Pistorius makes Rachel a heroine worth rooting for.
Home to an impressively sustained assault of vehicular destruction and slasher movie violence, Unhinged is sure to get the job done for the horror crowd while likely leaving others wondering what the hell the point of all the mayhem even is. Of course, the point is that there is no real point. Unhinged doesn’t seem to be saying anything beyond the fact that people are scary and you ought to be careful which bears you’re poking out there in the world; the nameless “Man” that Crowe plays, the film cautions, can happen to you as suddenly as he happens to Rachel. Someone else’s bad day can become your worst day through no fault of your own.
And really, what’s more terrifying than that?
There may not be much to Unhinged, but it manages to be an effective nuts and bolts slasher-thriller all the same. Tightly edited and with a pounding, acutely distressing score to amplify the big suspense sequences, it’s nothing if not a good time. And sometimes that’s really all a movie needs to be.
Just please don’t risk your health seeing this one in theaters. It can wait.
