Unhinged Review

Road rage: it is something that most people have suffered from at some time in their lives. The thriller Unhinged takes the experience of road rage to its nightmarish extreme.

Rachel (Caren Pistorius) is a struggling single mother who’s often late, lost her business, and has an ex-husband demanding their house. When she’s late taking her son to school she ends up crossing a man (Russell Crowe) who demands an apology. When Rachel refuses the man says he’s going to show the woman what a bad day is really like.

Unhinged is one of the first major films to get a wide theatrical release since cinemas have started to reopen. The marketing campaign has even focused on this and there has been a poster saying “I saw Unhinged at a f*!#king theater!” Film fans have been craving something new and this properly gives Unhinged a boost.

Unhinged had a simple premise that made it a modern version of Duel. Both films focus on unsuspecting people crossing the wrong driver. The car carnage in Unhinged was well done as Rachel’s old car try to outrun The Man’s monster of a pickup truck. There were intense as there were cars were crashing and there was a lot of collateral damage. It was refreshing to see all this action was done in-camera.

Even though Unhinged was classified as a thriller it does play out a horror film. The Man was a combination of a slasher villain hunting victims down and the Saw villain Jigsaw. The Man wanted Rachel to suffer and made it personal: he attacked Rachel’s friends and families in a psychological move. The Man also tries to gaslight Rachel by pinning the blame on her. He clearly had issues with women because he tries to defend Rachel’s deadbeat husband and claims Rachel’s friend/lawyer was a leach who caused men misery. Crowe and the filmmakers succeed in making The Man hateable.

This gaslighting theme inadvertently made Unhinged similar to The Invisible Man. That villain in The Invisible Man set out to separate his ex-girlfriend from her friends and families and torture her psychologically. The Invisible Man was a much more sophisticated film than Unhinged.

Unhinged had an exploitive quality like a horror film from the ‘70s or ‘80s: it was a film with a simple premise and lots of grizzly violence. The film opens with The Man going into a house and brutally beats up a man and woman in their house with a hammer. The film did have realistic-looking violence, and this leads to the unfortunate truth of the film: it was unpleasant to watch. It was uncomfortable to watch people getting tortured, it was like a throwback to the torture porn craze of the noughties.

The film tried to foreshadow the themes with the opening credits showing news reports about people using items when driving, people becoming more violent, and increasing wealth inequality. But this opening montage comes across as heavy-handed and these ideas were barely explored in the actual film. It was like the filmmakers were trying to give Unhinged more depth than it really had.

Unhinged is the type of film that would have been a straight-to-DVD under normal circumstances. Its status was raised by somehow getting Russell Crowe to star, some strong production values, and a baren cinematic schedule.