Unhinged story and endings, explained

Unhinged opens with a phone call from Ava’s friend, Claire, who lives across the street. With the power down in the neighborhood and a Category 5 hurricane fast approaching, Ava is forced to spend the night alone. Though Claire has the company of her furry companion, she can’t sleep either.

Ava decides to check on a friendly neighbor, Joyce, who lives on the same floor. But the door is ajar, the fridge wide open, and she’s not answering when Ava calls. Something is wrong. It isn’t until Ava returns to find her apartment door open and Claire’s words start to sink in: There’s someone inside.

Here is our interpretation of Unhinged‘s story and endings.

https://embeds.beehiiv.com/a8d62108-86ed-4039-bf49-44877ba62c15 Warning for spoilers throughout

• Unhinged story, explained
  • A game of cat-and-mouse
  • What happened to Noah?
  • Who is the killer?
  • What happened to Joyce?
• Unhinged endings, analyzed

Screenshot by Destructoid It’s established repeatedly that Ava is trapped in every sense of the word. Outside is freezing, a hurricane moves in overhead, and thunder roars to the beat of lightning. The stairwell doors are padlocked too, a bizarre choice given the circumstances, as the lift isn’t working either. Why would the superintendent, Ben, lock the way out?

Screenshot by Destructoid Visual reminders of Ava’s dire situation are not only in the lockdown apartment building, but also include a mouse caught in a trap. The story is a short cat-and-mouse thriller with shocking moments, where the killer is fixated on perfecting how tonight goes. In this story, Ava is the mouse caught in a trap set by a crazed killer. There’s also a mannequin in the basement which physically represents her too; a plaything or companion for the antagonist. After all, a doll cannot reject you, cannot tell you what you’re doing is wrong.

Screenshot by Destructoid By investigating Ava’s message log, you can deduce that Ava and Noah are exes. This trio, once inseparable, was forced apart due to the relationship turning sour, with Claire taking Ava’s side during the breakup. But it’s clear in the messages that Noah still cares.

Once Ava gets to Noah’s apartment, she finds him at the center, completely still. The attacker got to him too. His face is covered in plastic to stifle his screams. His stomach is ripped open, and his innards are spilling out. But he’s still breathing, meaning this just happened mere moments ago. Duct tape on the kitchen counter, timed to the storm—this was planned. His scream brings the killer straight to Ava, where she has no choice but to watch him pull Noah’s intestines to the sink for a “clean.”

Screenshot by Destructoid You probably put two and two together by this point, but the security room in the basement lifts the curtain. There’s a board with pictures of Noah, Joyce, and Ava. A heart sprawled repeatedly over Ava’s face, the others crossed out. This room shows not only surveillance of the apartment floors, but of hidden cameras in Ava’s apartment. Her living room, bedroom, even her bathroom.

Then the identity of the killer is revealed. Ava watches the attacker on the camera, and as he dials a number on his phone, hers starts to ring. It’s Ben, the super, asking where she is.

Screenshot by Destructoid After Ava’s abysmal attempt to fight back (can’t really blame her when she fell down a garbage chute), Ben nails her hands to the table of her replica apartment. She is faced with the terrifying reveal that Joyce—just like Noah—was murdered. Based on the limited information we’re given, I presume Joyce was led here by Ben earlier that day, manipulated with a box of chocolates, and perhaps placed here in a twisted attempt to bring Ava’s loved ones together in her pretend apartment in hopes she’d play along with his insanity.

Ben’s motives are unclear. But, based on what we know—his messed-up experiments on people and his obsession with Ava—there’s a good chance Ben viewed his victims as puppets to talk to and play with. This, alongside recreating Ava’s apartment after watching her on secret cameras for who knows how long, points to his desire to create a home for himself filled with corpses he’d talk to as if they were still alive.

I could be reaching here, of course, but given his unstable and erratic behavior, I believe Ben took extreme measures for control in his life, and perhaps sought to “cleanse” his victims of their “sins” by washing their innards or removing them completely so they’d resemble mannequins/puppets. He did not view his victims as human, but something to experiment on.

Screenshot by Destructoid Ava shoots Ben four times with the nail gun. There’s a moment of hesitation as she reunites with her friend, as if we weren’t supposed to trust Claire this entire time. This doesn’t go anywhere, however, as there’s a time jump, where Ava receives an ominous call confirming one thing: Ben didn’t die.

There are two endings in Unhinged, and the difference comes down to the only real decision point in the game: Do you take Ben’s call?

Screenshot by Destructoid I (as I imagine most players) didn’t pick up the call. But if you did, you see a short cutscene that slowly zooms onto the picture that fell in Ava’s living room; the one featuring herself, Claire, and Noah. Ben tells Ava they will meet again.

The endings feel symbolic of Ava’s position throughout the story and a metaphor for toxic relationships—how we must leave them behind if we wish to move on. As Ben viewed Ava as a fantasy, she too had to kill the idea of a sick man who’d stop at nothing to find her, so that she may finally heal. Ignoring the call means Ben—in her mind—died that night. Meanwhile, taking the call reignites that trauma.

You could theorize Ben did die that day and that the call was a look into Ava’s psyche processing that terrifying night, but Night School Studio’s Director Sean Krankel confirmed the final phone call was real.



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