Unhinged (2020)

Derrick Borte's Unhinged is a road-rage parable with a body count and very little on its mind beyond the body count. Russell Crowe plays Tom Cooper, a man who begins his morning by burning down his ex-wife's house and spends the rest of the runtime working through a list of grievances against a stranger who honked at him. Caren Pistorius is Rachel, a mother in the middle of a divorce, a woman having a bad day that the film escalates into a worse one. The premise is lean, the execution is loud, and the cultural residue is close to nothing.

Where the film touches on matters of social consciousness, it does so glancingly. Tom's backstory arrives by way of a television news report: a middle manager at an auto plant, injured on the job, fired just shy of his pension, addicted to painkillers, unable to find steady work. This is economic grievance offered as villain origin, not as indictment. Rachel's arc ends with her stabbing a man in the eye with scissors, which reads as standard survival-thriller furniture. Tom's letter calls her entitled and self-centered, and the closing scene finds her declining to honk at a rude driver. A cautionary nudge about manners. That is the sermon, and it lasts about four seconds.

Everything else is absent. The cast is white, the themes are domestic, the weather is weather. Tom is a psychopath with a substance problem, which the film states outright, and no amount of diagnostic generosity recasts him as anything else. There is no history to revise and no capital to eat. What remains is a serviceable B-movie with a large man in a pickup truck, and the sense that its ambitions never extended past the next intersection.