The five most unhinged performances in cinema history
Is there anything more exciting than sitting down to watch a movie and witnessing, in real-time, a performance so unhinged that it knocks you for six? We know it gets out heartbeat racing, that’s for sure.
The word “unhinged” is defined as “highly disturbed, unstable, or distraught”. Throughout cinema history, we’ve seen an awful lot of characters who could fall under that definition. The best ones have seen an actor reach a part of their soul that few humans want to acknowledge exists before throwing it up on-screen in all its messy, terrifying glory.
Before we get to our top five unhinged performances, though, it’s worth giving a few honourable mentions. I’d like to extend our apologies to Matthew Lillard in Scream, Tom Hardy in Bronson, James McAvoy in Split, Andrew Robinson in Dirty Harry, and Isabelle Adjani in Possession. They all did incredible work – but, alas, this list is limited to just five.
Also, a shout out to Russell Crowe for his sterling portrayal of the ultimate road rage father in Derrick Borte’s “does what it says on the tin” thriller Unhinged. The movie isn’t great – but Crowe sure is.
Cinema’s five most unhinged performances:
5. Longlegs (Oz Perkins, 2024)
Few actors are as reliably unhinged as Nicolas Cage. In a career that has seen him go off the rails in spectacular fashion on countless occasions, he has given us an abundance of memorably off-the-wall characters like Castor Troy, Red Miller, Lt Terence McDonagh, Peter Loew, Ronny Cammareri and HI McDunnough. Cage eventually became so known for chewing the scenery and throwing caution to the wind that he was turned into a meme.
This does the man a disservice, though, because when he is truly unleashed, Cage can deliver a character that will live forever. In fact, I would argue he did just that earlier this year in Oz Perkins’ demonic serial killer thriller Longlegs. As the titular killer—or, more accurately, facilitator of death—Cage creates something that makes the audience uncomfortable from minute one.
With his surgically botched face caked in white makeup, a long, straggly white wig, and that horrifying sing-song voice, Longlegs is an unhinged work of art. Only after you watch the film do you start to wonder, “Was that kind of silly?” When you watch scenes out of context, it can certainly appear that way. But while Longlegs is playing, does Perkins have that feeling of dread wrapped permanently around your throat? Buddy. It ain’t silly at all.
4. Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1988)
Glenn Close’s turn as jilted love Alex in Fatal Attraction is so deeply woven into the fabric of modern society that the term “bunny boiler” has entered the popular lexicon. Over the course of the film, Alex becomes more and more obsessed with Michael Douglas‘ Dan Gallagher, a married man. She’s unable to accept that he has ended their illicit affair, and she starts an ever-increasing campaign of revenge against him. It starts with threatening voicemails, moves on to throwing acid on his car, and reaches its peak when she boils his daughter’s bunny rabbit alive.
It all builds to an unhinged climax in which Alex attacks Gallagher and his family with a knife, and he is forced to kill her. This ending, with Alex’s wild-eyed bloodlust, is an unhinged masterpiece – but it wasn’t initially supposed to be what happened. In the original script, Alex commits suicide, but producers believed audiences would want to see her get her comeuppance.
Close fought against the change, as she felt it betrayed her character by turning a mentally ill woman into an outright villain. In 2017, she told Entertainment Weekly, “In approaching Alex, I just wanted to make sure that my character didn’t get trashed. I felt a lot of empathy for her. She was somebody who was basically out of control. She wasn’t an evil person.” In the end, Close relented and eventually saw that the ending was what helped make the movie a hit.
She reasoned: “Shakespeare and the Greeks weren’t wrong: catharsis is important and the easiest way to get catharsis is to shed blood. We gave the audience the catharsis that it needed.”
3. The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991)
When Ted Levine auditioned to play serial killer Jame Gumb – better known as “Buffalo Bill” – in The Silence of the Lambs, he was pretty jacked up on caffeine. He read opposite Brooke Smith, the actor who plays the senator’s daughter, Gumb kidnaps in the movie, and she was blown away by what he did.
Smith told Rolling Stone: “I asked him, ‘What the hell did you do in that audition? You were so amazing.’ He was like, ‘Well, you know, I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do, so I just drank a lot of coffee.'” Who would have thought java would be the key to unlocking a performance so malevolent, so disturbing, and so unhinged that casting agents would have trouble seeing Levine as anything other than a killer for years?
In terms of unhinged moments, Gumb has a number of great ones in the movie – but the favourite will always be the “It rubs the lotion on its skin” scene. The way he screams back at his captive as she’s trapped below him is just incredibly frightening. He’s mocking her fear, but the look on his face and the mania in his voice speaks to so much more going on underneath. Spine-chilling.
2. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Another A-lister known for going all in, the legendary Jack Nicholson, has delivered several unforgettable unhinged characters. While his portrayal of The Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman is iconic, it leans more towards cartoonish villainy than true madness. Frank Costello, his wild Boston mob boss in The Departed, is certainly a contender, but not quite the one we’re looking for. Even his portrayal of the Devil in The Witches of Eastwick doesn’t quite hit the mark.
For me, Nicholson’s unhinge peak has got to be his legitimately startling portrayal of Jack Torrance in The Shining. Given how well-known the performance has become over the years – and how often the “Here’s Johnny!” scene has been parodied – it’s easy to forget just how frightening he is in the film.
Nicholson is incredible as the alcoholic, abusive writer slowly losing his marbles in the haunted Overlook Hotel. By the time he’s stalking his family with an axe through a frozen maze – howling in anguish at the heavens as he goes – it’s a work of unhinged perfection.
1. Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990)
At the 2024 Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony, Kathy Bates presented an award alongside Giancarlo Esposito and Anthony Starr – both known for playing terrifying villains in Breaking Bad and The Boys. She joked about how hard it is for actors who play terrifying characters when they’re in the real world, deadpanning, “Do you know how hard it was to get a date after Misery?!”
Obviously, this was just a scripted bit of banter at an awards show – but it did speak to the power of Bates’ performance as psychotic superfan Annie Wilkes in that movie. Wilkes is both hilarious and horrifying in the film – often in the same scene – and that’s why she comes across so damn unhinged.
In a way, Wilkes seems more real than many screen villains – she’s just a fan of writer Paul Sheldon’s work, and she seems capable of being incredibly caring toward him at times. Then again, though, she’s also capable of strapping him to a bed and breaking both his ankles with a sledgehammer to stop him from leaving. You probably couldn’t reason with an unhinged maniac like that!
