Upamanyu Biswas
Directed by Derrick Borte, ‘Unhinged’ follows a soon-to-be-divorced woman, Rachel Flynn, whose life is upended after she draws the anger of a violent stranger while driving her son Kyle to his school. When Rachel refuses to apologize for incessantly honking behind the man, she finds herself hunted by him as he seeks to make her live through the worst day possible. What begins as a petty case of road rage soon escalates into much darker territory as everyone in Rachel’s life becomes a target for the man. To make matters worse, he has no intention of preserving his own safety, choosing to torment the protagonist even if it comes at the cost of his own life.
The high-octane action thriller ends with the man going after what Rachel values the most – her son. However, to protect him, she has to abide by the rules of his various games. With each decision Rachel takes, the man probes deeper into her desperation and anxiety, trying to make her suffer for her lack of apology at the traffic sign. Eventually, with nowhere to hide, Rachel and Kyle rush to the safety of her mother’s empty home while the madman pursues them. Unfortunately, their getaway ends with a tense showdown at the house, where Rachel’s maternal instincts are pivotal in deciding her son’s fate. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Unhinged Plot Synopsis
One night, a man named Tom Cooper enters the house of his ex-wife and murders her and her new husband. Subsequently, he laces the place with gasoline and burns it to the ground before driving away. The next day, the story is covered by news channels around the country. Meanwhile, Rachel Flynn, a single mother who is waiting to complete her divorce, wakes up late for work. She drives her son, Kyle, to his elementary school but is deflated when she hears from an office client that she has been fired for her tardiness. Rachel suffers from a chronic case of being late to everything, which has cost her various things in life. Feeling downbeat, she honks repeatedly behind a pickup truck that stops at a green light. At the next traffic light, the car pulls up to Rachel’s, and the driver reveals himself as Tom Cooper.
Tom tells Rachel that he is owed a “courtesy tap” before being honked upon as she did to him. Rachel ignores him initially but eventually has a full-blown argument and a heated exchange. The conversation angers Tom as he starts berating her attitude and rants about her lack of apology for her part in the situation. She remains staunch in her convictions and tells him she has nothing to apologize for. Tom promises that he will make Rachel rue her lack of manners by subjecting her to the worst day possible. Soon after, he scares her and Kyle by trying to draw them into a couple of traffic accidents. After dropping Kyle off at school, Rachel starts fearing that Tom might be serious about his promise when she sees his car pull up behind hers at a gas station. A customer named Leo protects her, but he is then run over by Tom.
Matters get worse when Rachel realizes her phone is missing. Tom stole it from her and used her contact list to find people he could hurt in her life. He visits Rachel’s divorce lawyer, Andy, at Darrow’s Diner and ends up killing him. The news shocks Rachel as she is stuck in a phase of denial. Subsequently, Tom offers Rachel options about who she would want him to kill next. Losing her mind over her situation, the protagonist suggests that he can kill Deborah Haskell, the client who fired her. She immediately rushes to collect her son from school, wasting no time doing so. Meanwhile, she learns that Tom duped her and is now at her home with her brother Fred. He kills his fiancee, Mary, by making Fred stab her. When the police show up, Tom sets Fred on fire before escaping with a bullet in his shoulder.
Unhinged Ending: Why is Tom After Rachel?
At its heart, ‘Unhinged’ is a straightforward survival story. As such, like all great survival narratives, it needs the protagonist struggling against a force of nature, whether it be a natural disaster or a post-apocalyptic scenario. In the case of the film in question, the force of nature presents itself through Tom Cooper. He personifies the idea of an ordinary stranger with a monster lurking inside. This becomes evident when he visits all manner of nightmarish scenarios in Rachel’s day-to-day existence. Even if the inciting incident starts off with a trivial argument, Tom is angered more by the moral principle of her lack of apology and not the act itself. In reality, he is lashing out for the injustices he has suffered in his life. He becomes obsessed with making Rachel feel terrible because that is how he feels internally.
During several moments in the story, Tom keeps iterating that he is a decent man who the world has chewed out constantly, leaving him with no other way to vent his frustrations than to descend into bouts of rage and violence. In particular, he keeps going back to how his ex-wife divorced him despite the fact that he did nothing to deserve her leaving him for another man. That internal frustration becomes critical in understanding his character as he projects those same issues onto Rachel. Because the protagonist is going through a divorce of her own, Tom believes that she, too, is like his ex-wife and is playing with her husband’s emotions. He is incapable of separating his problems from Rachel’s, using her as a means to cope with whatever insecurities he has suffered personally. In short, he is well beyond his breaking point.
Does Rachel Save Kyle? Does She Kill Tom?
With Tom hot on their heels, Rachel and Kyle rush to her mother’s suburban home, where there is a hiding place for her son. They momentarily slip past Tom, which Rachel uses to her advantage by sending her boy into the house. Eventually, Tom finds the place. At this point, he has already made it clear to Rachel that he is after Kyle, as he is the most important thing in her life. She rams into Tom’s minivan while he is distracted, which tips the car on its side. However, it does not complete the job as Tom suddenly ambushes her from behind while she looks to see if he is still alive. In the ensuing fight inside the house, Rachel and Kyle somehow injure Tom. Still, it almost costs Kyle his life as the man tries to strangle him with a cord. Before he can do so, Rachel stabs him through the eye and kills him.
The fight takes every ounce of strength and perseverance on the part of Rachel, who finds herself brutally attacked by Tom. However, her motherly instincts force her to keep trying and not give up. There is also a degree of fear motivating her as Tom tells her outside the house that he will always haunt her, especially after killing Kyle, which would make her rue her failure as a parent in guarding her son’s life. The thought propels her into action, even if it is a terrifying prospect. To some extent, the mother and son duo are helped by the fact that Tom was previously wounded by the bullet he took earlier. It still leads to an intense fight, one they are undoubtedly glad to have won. Additionally, the final killing blow also allows Rachel to serve up the same “courtesy tap” dialogue Tom told her in their first meeting.
Why Does Rachel Stop Herself From Honking the Horn? Does She Learn Her Lesson?
The final moments depict Rachel learning a key lesson from the harrowing events of the day and being chased by a lone madman through the town. After a nearby police officer informs her that her brother Fred is alive, despite being set on fire by Tom, she and Kyle drive to the hospital to visit him. On the way there, they are cut off by another speeding car, whose driver rages at Rachel for not driving properly. She stops herself from honking the horn, ignoring her instincts. It reflects the exact scenario she had with Tom in the film’s early parts, except this time, she is wary about attracting that kind of attention to herself. Even Kyle tells her that her decision not to honk is probably a good choice. In other words, they realize that having lived through Tom’s murder spree, it would be foolish to fall into the same trap once again.
Therefore, the ending scene circles back to one of the integral themes within the narrative: controlling one’s rage and refraining from lashing out at people over small things. Throughout the movie, there are numerous times when people on the streets are constantly screaming at each other. It relies upon the idea that with so much anger bubbling on both sides, it can only lead to a volcanic eruption later, which Rachel found out the hard way. Her so-called bad day turns into a hellish one when her inability to practice mediation leads to Tom latching onto her and making her suffer through countless terrible things. If she had kept herself calm and apologized when she needed to, she might have avoided all the chaos that followed. However, the moral lesson at the end is sure to stay with her for life, as it nearly led to catastrophe once.
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