UNIT 234 - Mark Reviews Movies

Unit 234, Brainstorm Media

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 8, 2025

Derek Steiner's screenplay for Unit 234 offers two genuine surprises. One of them will likely need to be at least hinted at in this review, simply because the entire plot depends on it. The other arrives late and forces us to re-evaluate everything in the story that came before it. By "everything," that includes the cheap coincidences and contrivances that allow the script to withhold such vital details for so long.

The biggest strength of the movie, apart from a couple of fine performances, is its setting. Almost the entirety of the story takes place in a storage facility in Jacksonville, Florida—one of those deals where people rent out what are basically small garages to hold items they don't have room for, they don't need anymore, or while they're in midst of some kind of transitioning period for housing. It's a neat locale for the kind of cat-and-mouse thriller that this eventually becomes, because there's a lot of open space and also plenty of cramped ones, as well as a bunch of storage units that could be good for hiding or for finding something that might help one survive a standoff with violent people.

Our protagonist is Laurie (Isabelle Fuhrman), who now runs the place after the deaths of her parents who owned it, and her entire life basically revolves around the business. She lives in a house that was first built on the property, before it became a storage facility. She feels obligated to keep it going, because it means maintaining her parents' legacy and out of guilt for why they died, and everything else about her life comes second to the business. That means not moving when her boyfriend (played by Anirudh Pisharody) took a job out of town, and it also means working on her birthday when no one else can cover the night shift.

On this particular night, a group of men, led by Jules (Don Johnson), have a reason to get into one of the storage units. It's absolutely vital for this man, whose hired goons, brothers Dante (Manny Galan) and Carlos (Juvian Marquez), kill the guy who rented the unit, put something inside it, and mistakenly tried to haggle the price of the key. It's connected to a brief, montage-like prologue that hints at organ donation, and since Jules is introduced as having a nasty and persistent cough that occasionally produces blood, the organ inside the unit must be connected to whatever is causing those symptoms.

The whole of the screenplay depends on our assumptions, and Steiner and director Andy Tennant are clever, if a bit obvious (or maybe that's just hindsight talking to some degree), in how much information they specifically put forward. Right before Jules shows up in the storage facility's office to try to convince Laurie to open the unit, for example, she's channel surfing and just happens to lose interest and mute the television as the news report of a "medical mystery" and Jules' face appear on the screen.

It's a cheeky touch, to be sure, but it's very, very convenient for the plot that Laurie doesn't see or hear things that would go a long way to solving pretty much every problem that arises. In retrospect, it's also very much convenient that the news report itself buries the lede of what's happening here so that even we're left in the dark about it.

Anyway, to focus too much on these on these obvious, almost necessary contrivances kind of goes against the spirit of such a thriller. It eventually has Laurie and Clayton (Jack Huston), a man who's connected to the aforementioned "medical mystery" in a way that won't be directly revealed here (It is, admittedly, a sincerely unexpected and pretty sinister development), trying to evade Jules, his muscle, his chauffeur (played by James Dumont), and a particularly nasty customer called "Doc" (Christopher Baker), whose medical know-how is as unquestionable as his dedication to the Hippocratic Oath is worthy of questioning totally.

Jules and his men hunt the pair. Laurie and Clayton try to get away from their pursuers and fight back whenever that's not possible.

It's basic stuff, made somewhat suspenseful by use of the location and its various qualities, the obvious cold-hearted cruelty of the antagonists, the fact that Clayton isn't exactly in the kind of physical condition to do much, and how Laurie has to use her knowledge of the facility to improvise various tactics to avoid the killers and attempt an escape. Johnson makes for a charming but ruthless villain, and Fuhrman plays a sympathetically smart and capable hero whose only flaws, perhaps, are that she doesn't consider what's right in front of her and that she couldn't just turn her head a bit to the side to look at the TV.

A lot of this does eventually feel as if the screenplay is figuratively running in circles, while the characters might literally be doing that on several occasions. As for what Unit 234 eventually reveals about this entire scenario, that's a superficially nasty trick, to be sure. It's tough to argue, however, that the movie truly earns that by way of so much trickery or that it finally does something of note with that revelation.

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