Unhinged (2020)

(Netflix Streaming, October 2021) There’s something detestably pernicious in Unhinged’s opening credit sequence that sets the tone and adverse reaction from the audience—a numbing collage of carefully chosen statistics and opinions meant to rile us up into a paranoid vision of the world: We’re stressed, we’re angry, we’re under threat and that normalizes utter psychopathy. I do not think that’s a responsible message, especially as Unhinged completely falls apart if you don’t have a perfect psychopath at the heart of its narrative. It does begin, after all, with the antagonist (a rotund Russell Crowe as loathsome as he’s mesmerizing) setting fire to a house in order to kill his estranged wife and her boyfriend. We’re fed some claptrap about him losing his job due to a workplace accident and subsequent opioid addiction, but little of that is important beyond having a villain able to perform a preposterous series of violent actions meant to terrify our protagonist. The spark is a road rage incident, but the purpose is a rollercoaster series of thrills from beginning to end. Few other recent films have featured so much vehicular smashing and destruction (down to a T-bone collision that doesn’t just send a car flying, but utterly smashes through its steel frame—thanks CGI!) nor any villain so disconnected from reality (his or ours) as to casually kill someone inside a crowded diner and walk away. Even in the universe of thrillers, Unhinged is less believable than most, and that severely limits its ability to be effective. By the time a trail of carnage follows the action (along with unexplained shortcuts having to do with magically finding our protagonist, or unlocking her cell phone), we’ve grown almost entirely unconcerned that something like that could even happen to us. There’s too much gory unnecessary violence (including from the protagonist) and bad attitude to make this fun, and I think that’s an issue by itself: you want thrillers to be scary but rewatchable, like a roller-coaster ride, not tip over in horror and have viewers say, “yuck!”  But Unhinged’s opening moment sets the tone: this will be ugly, and this won’t have any relationship with reality.