Unhinged

This review may contain spoilers!

Not even Russell Crowe can carry this bland, generic thriller across the finish line. I would give Unhinged a 3/10.

Unhinged follows Rachel, a young mother who is trying to hold together a stressful life when a confrontation with a psychotic individual at an intersection turns her into a target for his twisted revenge. While I do not think the film did a good job of it I have to commend its attempt to run a narrative around the increased stress and anger people face or internalise in their day to day lives and how this is released into the world, there was a real push here to make something grounded in a setting that is familiar. This film really exemplified itself with how it presented violence, the degrees of carnage the main antagonist causes with a couple of cars and household objects is pretty terrifying. Violence is sudden in this film and almost unavoidable, the nature of how inescapable the killer's particular brand of destruction is makes those high stakes scenes so worth watching.

The best performance came from Russell Crowe, who played the Man. I know, insightful character name. Getting past the lack of identity to enhance the paper-thin theme of the plot; Crowe's performance is one of the genuine saving graces of the film. When this role is idle he seems haunted by his own mind, his pain and experiences have really hollowed him out and left this vindictive creature in his place. There are multiple moments throughout the feature in which the Man comes across as very charismatic, offering a moment of connection or blending in with the local patronage of a diner. But the strength in Crowe's performance is how he either steadily descends into the violent persona we are commonly confronted with or he will swiftly switch to this, which really ramps up tension in a scene. This isn't going to be one of the most well-remembered thriller antagonists but Crowe gives more to this film than it really deserves.

This movie never really promises much to begin with, the film premise is quite simply 'what happens if road rage bred a psychopathic killer?' I think that alone already sets up a pretty simplistic thriller but when the feature starts trying to be smarter than it is by incorporating some kind of commentary about the state of society and the boiling mental and emotional pot we're all living in. There is this long montage showing road rage clips to the backdrop of radio/TV presenters talking about the big commute and mental health right at the beginning of the film. It's a sequence that has a really obvious message behind it but it hasn't really done any work to construct a very convincing theme. The film then proceeds to bore us with the most strained attempt I've seen to create realistic and grounded characters who struggle with divorce or have kids that play Fortnite. The film is so insistent that this takes place in 'the real world' that the situation already begins to feel a little stilted long before the Man and Rachel interact. Once the antagonist does enter the scene however, we descend pretty quickly into stereotypical territory. Long drawn out moments of suspense and paranoia, a climbing kill count, the antagonist is near unbeatable and they both shout the same threats and pleas we've heard in every other thriller before. The film fizzles out by taking our vehicle-heavy story off the road and into a simple house confrontation that never manages to achieve a satisfying finale to the journey we go through. The cinematography for this film shows everything to an annoying degree; we get shots of every little detail or exchange within a scene to an annoying extent. This is a film in which you can only make the same shots of your characters driving or clog a scene with a setting from twelve different angles so much. The film doesn't feel polished or edited enough, there needed to be more work done to craft a stylised end product. The score for the feature in non-existent, opting instead for a dull, warbling drone that feels more repetitive than ominous.

Jimmi Simpson, who played Andy, is a bit of a strange appearance in this film; Simpson is caught in such an unassuming background role that I was confused with why he'd even bothered with the part. Caren Pistorius, who played Rachel, really puts her all into this film but it isn't enough to escape such a poor script; Pistorius pushes out generic line after generic line and never finds away to make her protagonist unique or interesting. Gabriel Bateman, who played Kyle, plays his role quite timidly and as such becomes a bit of a wallflower in his scenes; Bateman and Pistorius aren't especially convincing as mother and son which is another big fail for the feature. Austin P. McKenzie, who played Fred, seems so entirely disconnected from the rest of the cast I had trouble reconciling him as a family member relation to Pistorius and Batmena's roles; in any teen-thriller McKenzie would have been the comedic stoner role who probably died first.