Despite being one of only two movies Quentin Tarantino said he would have paid to see in theaters during the pandemic, Unhinged feels like a movie that’s perfectly concocted for a great night on Netflix. It’s a thriller that’s equal parts terrifying and silly, it’s got a movie star giving a terrific performance as a loose-cannon murderer, and at just 81 minutes long (before the credits) it knows exactly how not to overstay its welcome. So now that it actually is on Netflix, it’s the perfect time to check it out.
The movie follows Rachel (Caren Pistorius), a young mom going through a divorce, living with her burnout brother and his fiance and trying to keep her life on track. One harried morning (which we learn is the norm for Rachel), in the middle of trying to get her son to school (late) and getting fired from her job (for being late), she gives into a satisfying bout of road rage and lays on the horn because the pickup truck driver in front of her won’t go despite the fact that the light is clearly green. The one problem for Rachel, her son, and everyone she’s ever met is that the driver of that truck (Russell Crowe) was just driving back from killing his ex-wife and her new husband, and decides that the rude driver behind him is going to be his next victim.
The Rachel character is part of Unhinged’s particularly fun secret sauce. A lesser movie might have given in to the temptation to make Rachel feel fairly anonymous, to help audiences relate to her, or even make her a perfect angel for audiences to root for while she’s being hunted by Crowe’s demon in a pickup truck. But Unhinged does something smarter than that: It makes Rachel an absolute mess. She makes enough mistakes in the first 10 minutes, either through rudeness or carelessness, that it’s no surprise something terrible happened. She’s like everyone’s worst habit or worst day rolled into one person, in a way you can’t help but both relate to and cringe at all at once. All this over-the-top characterization also makes for the perfect justification for when Rachel starts to make a series of incredibly poor choices as she tries to escape her torment, something few thrillers like this build in from the beginning. And of course, it all plays perfectly with the fact that everyone watching knows no mistake or act of vaguely selfish unkindness could possibly justify the horror the driver decides he’s going to unleash.
But for all the fun to be had in the absolute disaster that is Rachel, it’s Crowe who’s the real star of the show here. In his hands, the driver Tom Cooper is absolutely terrifying, a cross between an identifiable person you might shy away from in Home Depot and a slasher villain who would feel at home in Haddonfield. Crowe plays seething rage as well as anyone in Hollywood, and his movie star charm is brilliantly displaced in this murderer who’s decided to make his terrible day everyone’s problem.
All that is fairly expected from a middle-career Russell Crowe performance, though. What might not be so expected is just how physically imposing Crowe gets to be here. It’s rare that any movie lets him make use of his full frame (outside of The Nice Guys, which utilizes this brilliantly), but director Derrick Borte lets Crowe be his massive, threatening self here. When he finally catches up to Rachel and the two get into any kind of scuffle, Crowe bounces her off walls easily, making the true real-world threats of this movie feel viscerally apparent.
And that gets us back to the alchemy that makes Unhinged great: It combines these moments of relatability and genuine fear with enough high-speed minivan chases and unexpectedly massive car crashes to bounce effortlessly between terror and goofiness, which makes it a perfect movie to throw on Netflix during a weekend at home. Just make sure to watch it on a day you haven’t honked at anyone.
Unhinged is now streaming on Netflix.