Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
It’s a big world out there, and that alone can make it seem pretty scary for some people. The uncertainty, the unknown, the unfamiliar – while there are those among us who crave exploration, they’re seemingly outnumbered by those who prefer to close their doors, their borders, and their hearts to whomever – and whatever – sits on the other side. The temptation will be strong to label The Outer Threat as a Temu Disclosure Day, but open your heart to it (and accept its budgetary limitations), and you’ll be rewarded with an engaging, hopeful genre tale.
Daniel (Mark O’Brien) is an astrophysicist living on a remote farm with Michelle (Constance Wu) and their two children (Callista Crowe, Isaac Smelcer-Zhang). He retreats every day to an underground bunker where he monitors and searches the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life, and one morning he finds just that – clear evidence of an advanced civilization that’s successfully found a way to harvest the power of their solar system’s sun. He’s understandably ecstatic and in a hurry to tell the world, but Michelle, a retired scientist who’s nearly given up on humanity as a whole and chooses to focus solely on her family, is adamant that he keep quiet.
He goes against her wishes, obviously, and sends an email filled with data attachments to his boss at NORAD. The result is almost immediate as electrical power, internet connections, and cell service all shut off in and around their small nearby town. Soon small drones are buzzing their farm and peeping in their windows, MQ-9 Reapers are bombing their bunker, and unmarked cars are following their every move.
Writer/director William Woods makes his directorial debut with The Outer Threat, and while his ambitions dwarf his resources, the end result is a compelling family adventure that argues for opening our metaphorical doors to the unknown. A strong cast, that also includes a supporting turn from the always welcome William Fichtner, helps carry the downtime between suspense sequences and minor set pieces. It’s an undeniably small film, but its ideas and conversations are exponentially bigger.
Michelle’s beef with humankind stems from both the personal and the general state of the world at large. Her father (Oscar Hsu) is also a scientist, and like Daniel, he risked valuing his work over his family to the point that Michelle no longer speaks with him. Her bigger issue is knowing that our species is a poor steward of both this planet and each other, and when Daniel accuses her of having little faith in humanity, she replies only “not without reason.”
One of The Outer Threat’s most interesting sequences will feel like a disjointed detour to some, but it actually encapsulates one of the film’s central themes in one simple exchange. The family is on the road and heading to Michelle’s father’s place – she’s not thrilled, but his past work with the government might come in handy – when they decide to stop for food. They reach a tiny town that looks deceptively abandoned and are welcomed into a diner by the owner, Sam (Fichtner), and his young granddaughter.
He’s initially cautious and explains that soldiers had passed through, telling everyone to remain indoors, but he proceeds to feed the family in need while explaining that he’s hoping to scrounge up some fuel to reconnect with the rest of his family. Sam also shares with Michelle that he hesitated to open his door to them simply because they were different. He was fearful, and now he’s ashamed and worried that maybe he’s not the man he thought he was. “What really scares me,” he adds, “was the thought that maybe, just maybe, we’re all rotten.”
She listens. She leaves. And she never tells him about the numerous extra canisters of gas they have in the back of their pickup truck.
It’s a striking character beat as our protagonist, even halfway through the film, remains steadfast in her disconnect from others. She’s far from the only one in need of change, though, as it was Daniel’s hubris and ego that led to this situation in the first place. “Our kids should be home safe,” she tells him at one point, “but you just had to let the world know how smart you are.” Woods and his cast mine drama from this brilliant but misaligned couple, and both Wu and O’Brien are convincing in their motivations and emotions.
Somewhat less convincing are the film’s occasional swings at big visual effects. Drones and weather balloons in the sky are passable, but explosions, vast encampments, and more land with an iffy digital thud. None of them are deal breakers, though, both because they’re used sparingly and because the characters and their dilemma take center stage.
Woods, whose best and brightest accomplishment remains serving as a producer on the criminally underseen 2020 film, The Kid Detective, arguably bites off a bit more than he can chew with The Outer Threat. His big ideas on both story and humankind are inevitably under-explored in a film of this size, and you’ll be left wishing he had a bigger budget behind him. Audiences are bound to expect something more from the film’s third act, especially, so set your expectations accordingly going in that this is more a film about human connection and ideals than it is a tale of alien invasion.
There are moments here of genuine suspense and thrills, but the film’s power rests in those human beats. From Sam revealing he was concealing a gun while making them pancakes, to Michelle’s father pushing aside huge news of world-altering significance so he can instead spend time with grandchildren he’s only just met, to feuding kids combining their skills for an act of bravery, this is a movie about people who can be so much more than we believe ourselves capable of being.
“For thousands of years human beings have been the dominant species on this planet,” says a character at a certain point, “but that’s no longer the case.” The trailer teases this line, and while you can’t fault the marketing department, it might feel like a bit of a bait and switch by the time the end credits roll. You can choose to be underwhelmed, but here’s hoping you open the door to the film’s hopefulness instead.
The Outer Threat is now available on VOD and Digital.
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