Unhinged Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Takes a Swing and a Miss at Mixed Media
I’ll admit to being initially quite excited about Netflix’s Unhinged.
Starring legendary game actor Troy Baker, in addition to the formidable talents of Zoë Kravitz and Sadie Sink, the new horror/thriller that you play like a video game even had powerhouse survival horror developers Bloober Team step in to lend a hand.
The idea is not new. We’ve seen similar in previous, rougher projects like Bandersnatch, Minecraft: Story Mode, and Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale — the title that started the entire “transmedia” genre. However, Unhinged is the latest to feature such a high-profile cast and developer behind it. The buzz practically writes itself.
The TV show/game sees players using their real-life smartphones as controllers to navigate their character, Ava (voiced by Zoë Kravitz), through an empty apartment building during a blackout and hurricane — all while dodging a demented serial killer. Ava’s best friend Claire (Sadie Sink) is on hand with calls and texts as backup and moral support when things seem grimmest. When Claire calls or texts you, your actual phone buzzes, prompting you to respond to her incoming call in real time. But that’s not the only thing your phone is useful for in Unhinged. It can also be used as a flashlight: point it at the TV screen, and Zoë will shine a light into those creepy dark corners and ominous corridors at your command. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, your phone can be used to guide Ava through the deadly apartment block, letting you enter rooms, open doors, interact with objects, and so on.
The setup feels incredibly exciting, fresh, and innovative. However, Unhinged is lacking in depth in a couple of areas it should have mastered with flair.
The story itself is the first culprit. It’s too simple and short on nuance, essentially a horror story of the “body horror” variety. Think yards of slippery intestines, nails driven into hands, screwdrivers stabbed into torsos, and so on. The fingerprints of Bloober Team, the Polish studio so masterful at psychological horror in games like the critically acclaimed Silent Hill 2 remake and 2025’s highly imaginative, claustrophobic Cronos: The New Dawn, are nowhere to be found in Unhinged. The storyline is flat and lacking a “gotcha” of any kind. The playing arena is dull, consisting of a series of darkened corridors with apartment doors that, for the most part, don’t open to reveal anything of interest, and without much in the way of ingenuity. And the whole thing clocks in at approximately 20 minutes.
That brevity might be forgivable if the interactivity itself sang, but it’s here that Unhinged commits its worst sin. The phone mechanic feels genuinely novel, yet on screen, Ava’s movements are excruciatingly slow, and your actual influence over them is thin. In one scene, she escapes the deranged killer and makes it to the safety of a neighbor’s apartment. After a tense moment in which she struggles to break open the door lock (while the killer sloooowly approaches from around the corner) Ava makes it safely inside. But then she simply doesn’t think to close the door behind her. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Although the phone lets you navigate, it only does so in the most rudimentary fashion, offering a turn left or right, up or down, whenever the game has decided to provide those specific choices. If you want to slam that door shut and the experience wasn’t built to let you, you’re out of luck. Overall, it feels very much like a “game on rails” in most respects that matter. It’s full of the appearance of choice, but short on the substance of it.
That’s the real disappointment. Of all the things a Troy Baker-led, Bloober Team-assisted transmedia thriller should have nailed, it’s precisely the interactivity, that one ingredient that separates this from simply watching a horror movie, that feels the most shortchanged. A shorter, more linear story might have been fine on its own terms. Dressing that same story up as an interactive experience and then declining to let players meaningfully interact is what stings.
Despite Unhinged‘s shortcomings, I remain a huge fan of experimental uses of media in art. Although Unhinged didn’t quite hit the mark, Netflix clearly intends to continue pushing in this direction, and I applaud their efforts to create something new and to bravely cross boundaries. I choose to chalk Unhinged up as a proof of concept for whatever is waiting around the corner. Hopefully, it will be something more intriguing than a serial killer stereotype.
Unhinged is from Netflix’s own Night School Studio. It can be accessed from the Netflix Games row: simply scan the on-screen QR code to link your smartphone as a controller, and have at it.
