Film reviews: Unhinged | Proxima | Vigil | Make Up | The Fight

Road rage is the tired subject of a flabby would-be thriller starring Russell Crowe, but there’s a cheering arrival in the form of a stunning character study from a fresh talent

Russell Crowe in Unhinged

Unhinged (N/A) *

Proxima (12A) ****

Make Up (N/A) ****

The Vigil ***

The Fight (N/A) ***

The new Russell Crowe road-rage thriller Unhinged has the distinction of being the first mainstream star vehicle to get a cinematic release since March. Sadly, there could be no worse advert for the pleasures of the big screen than this frequently nasty and just plain dumb excuse for a movie.

Crowe plays a never-named psycho in a pick-up truck who murders his ex-wife and burns down her house in the film’s opening minutes, before proceeding to stalk, terrorise and physically brutalise newly divorced single mother Rachel (Caren Pistorius) after she refuses to apologise for honking her horn at him in rush-hour traffic.

Leaving aside the fact that the film seems to believe that road rage is some newly diagnosed hot-button issue, Unhinged has zero interest in using its exploitation credentials to do the one thing that might have made it interesting: present a credible portrait of white male rage.

Instead, it furnishes Crowe with a barely-explored backstory that seems to have been cribbed from Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down in order to focus its energies more on the sadistic, Saw-like game he forces Rachel to play as punishment for her perceived lack of courtesy.

The violence that follows is excessive and, in places, worryingly misogynistic, and director Derrick Borte seems to be revelling in the opportunity to deliver Grand Theft Auto-style vehicular slaughter whenever the story doesn’t require it.

As for the cast, Pestorius (who broke through in John McClean’s Slow West a few years ago) is still a little on the young side to be playing a divorcee with a 14-year old, while Crowe – bearded, burly and in possession of a Southern accent – takes the film’s title to heart with a one-note performance that makes little sense.

“There’s no such thing as the perfect astronaut, just like there’s no such thing as the perfect mother,” a character tells Eva Green’s space-bound protagonist in Proxima, writer/director Alice Winocour’s meditation on motherhood and space travel. Cast as a French astronaut called Sarah whose bond with her young daughter (Zélie Boulant-Lemesle) both hampers and fuels her preparations for a year-long mission to the International Space Station, Green is on brilliant form here, especially as the film zeroes in on the way entrenched attitudes towards professional women and working mothers in male-dominated fields (and society at large) start chipping away at her psyche at the very moment she most needs to focus on the job at hand.

British writer/director Claire Oakley makes an auspicious debut with Make Up, a visually stunning character study of a young woman figuring out who she is amid the haunting landscape of a Cornish caravan park in the off-season.

That might not sound especially cinematic, but Oakley frames her unglamorous setting with the sexualised intrigue of a Gregory Crewdson photo. There are flashes of Nicolas Roeg and Lynne Ramsay, too, in the abstract ways she visualises the interior life of her young protagonist Ruth (Molly Windsor, brilliant), a quiet Derby teenager whose arrival at the seasonal resort where her long-term boyfriend works sparks a kind of horror-inflected, quasi-detective-story journey of self-discovery after she finds strands from another woman’s hair on his jacket. What follows feels like the arrival of a major filmmaking talent.

Revolving around a young Jewish man struggling to reintegrate into society after leaving a tight-knit Hasidic community in Brooklyn, The Vigil may be the latest release from the Blumhouse horror stable, but it plays initially like a social realist spin on a psychological thriller.

Indeed, debut writer/director Keith Thomas is so good at rooting his sensitive protagonist, Jakov (Dave Davis), in the textured, sealed-off world of one of New York’s more orthodox communities that when Jakov reluctantly agrees to stand in as a “shomer” and keep vigil over the corpse of a recently deceased Holocaust survivor, it really does seem as if the film is going to take a more nuanced approach to the supernatural. Alas, as the film starts to literalise the presence of evil spirits, the jump scares start piling up and any ambiguity surrounding Jakov’s mental state starts to dissipate. It’s still a moderately effective shocker, but it would have been good to see Thomas push past his film’s more generic trappings.

The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU as it’s better known, has been defending the constitutionally protected rights of individuals in America for 100 years, but it’s had its work cut out since Donald Trump began his presidency. According to the rapidly increasing tally at the start of new documentary The Fight, the organisation has launched more than 140 lawsuits (and counting) against the Trump administration’s brazen authoritarianism.

The ensuing film follows four of these cases and while the people leading these fights are all heroic in their tireless commitment to the cause, The Fight does a decent job of humanising them. It also flags up the complexities of being part of such a progressively minded organisation when that also means sometimes having to defend the rights of those virulently opposed to your individual beliefs. That said, the daily drudgery of the job isn’t always that interesting to watch, though co-directors Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman and Eli Despres know that what’s at stake is dramatic and their ability to capture the way big decisions play out in small moments makes it work, not least because it reinforces the precarious nature of every victory. ■

Unhinged, Proxima and The Vigil are on select release in cinemas now; Make Up is available on demand from Curzon Home Cinema and will be available in cinemas at a future date; The Fight is available to stream on demand from dogwoof.com and most digital platforms.

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