The World Is a Vampire and Russell Crowe an Immovable Force in the Surprisingly Savage Unhinged

In a minor traffic infraction, Rachel of course runs afoul of The Man, still consumed by the double-homicide he’d committed earlier that morning. The incident escalates as one might expect: Rachel refuses to apologize for honking a bit too aggressively at the Man, implying he ought to roll up his window and mind his own goddamn business, and The Man refuses to let Rachel get away without apologizing, still filled with white-hot resentment at the women (his ex-wife among the murdered that morning) who have made America so unaccommodating to struggling dudes’ dudes like himself. In front of a panicking Kyle, The Man vows to make Rachel understand what a “bad day” can really be. Cue cascading horrors for the working mom.

Unhinged proceeds accordingly, The Man’s vow turning brazen as Rachel’s morning goes on and the bodies pile up in her wake. A man tries to help her at a gas station, her lawyer tries to meet up with her to talk over the divorce—The Man punishes these people for simply doing what they assume is, in the most casual way, right, Borte’s bleakest fears finding room to roost inside an exploitation aesthetic. The violence gets grimy, punctuated by car chases throughout New Orleans, curbing from Duel as much as The French Connection, terror mounting as Rachel, despite the public watching this all happen on the news and The Man admitting that suicide-by-cop is probably the fate toward which he ineluctably drives, realizes she’s trapped. Borte wields tension reliably, cinematographer Brandan Galvin keeping us aware of the geography of these high-speed altercations, the occasionally brutal automobile wreck or highway cop slaughter (one in particular is worth the price for rental alone) satisfying rewards for our attention, none of it particularly imaginative, but all of it particularly effective. One might compare it to Falling Down for MAGA chunkheads, or one might not even bother with pulling out salient commentary from all the pulp. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. This will end on a delightfully Schwarzeneggarian one-liner.

The film’s real weapon is Russell Crowe’s body, a Sisyphean boulder of flesh. A certifiable chode. Playing a formative frontier father figure in Jed Kurzel’s The True History of the Kelly Gang earlier this year, Crowe at this stage in his career, long past the point of embodying manly leading sexpot, represents an immovable physical force, chthonic and unknowable, the buffalo buffalo buffaloing his way through the End of History. Borte never feigns any actual exploration of The Man’s Alex Jones-like psyche, nor any interest in figuring out how these kinds of broken bros tick. He only insists on bearing witness to the violence, not examining the institutions that condone it. Rather than offer Rachel—a woman defined by trauma—a future in which she may eventually confront the misogynist terror that will undoubtedly haunt her for the rest of her life, he asks her to, y’know, maybe not honk at other drivers so much? We’ll take what we can get. Better to be safe than sorry.

Director: Derrick Borte
Writer: Carl Ellsworth
Starring: Russell Crowe, Caren Pistorius, Jimmi Simpson, Gabriel Bateman, Austin P. McKenzie
Release Date: August 21, 2020

Dom Sinacola is Associate Movies Editor at Paste and a Portland-based writer. You can follow him on Twitter.