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Unsane Review: Soderbergh Gets Creepy With An iPhone
THOUGH IT BITES OFF MORE THAN IT CAN CHEW, UNSANE MAKES FOR AN EFFECTIVELY CREEPY AND VISUALLY EXPERIMENTAL B MOVIE PSYCHO-THRILLER.
Steven Soderbergh has been making movies for nearly thirty years now. Over the course of his career thus far, he has focused heavily on experimenting with the forms and content of genre films. Even Soderbergh’s more mainstream movies, such as the Ocean’s trilogy and Magic Mike films, look and feel very different than other studio projects in the same genres. Unsane, which is Sodbergh’s second feature length film following his (very) short-lived retirement from directing movies, is no exception in that regard. Much of the pre-release buzz around the film has stemmed from the fact that Soderbergh shot Unsane entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus. However, that technical aspect is crucial to the movie’s storytelling and serves its narrative well. Though it bites off more than it can chew, Unsane makes for an effectively creepy and visually experimental B movie psycho-thriller.
Unsane stars Claire Foy as Sawyer Valentini, a hard-working and intelligent businesswoman with a promising career ahead of her. Sawyer is also antisocial, troubled, and spends her days warding off fears that her stalker David Strine (Joshua Leonard) is following her, despite the extreme measures – like moving hundreds of miles away – that she has taken to protect herself from him. When her paranoia starts to become overwhelming, Sawyer decides to sign up for a support group at a psychiatric institution… only to inadvertently commit herself to staying at the hospital overnight, in doing so.
Unfortunately, Sawyer’s attempts to protest her situation only make matters worse and lead to her being ordered to stay for a week by those who run the facility. After Nate Hoffman (Jay Pharoah) – a fellow inmate who is recovering from opioid addiction – informs her of the financial realities of how the institution works, Sawyer begrudgingly agrees to “serve her time” quietly, rather than protest further. However, everything changes when Sawyer finds out that David is hiding under a fake identity and working as a caretaker at the hospital. But is it really him, or has Sawyer’s anxiety finally gotten the best of her?
Soderbergh directed, shot, and edited Unsane before the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke last fall, but the movie feels almost tailor-made for the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp. One of the overarching themes of the film is how difficult the world makes it for victims of harassment and emotional abuse (women especially) to make their voices heard – and how often their behavior is dismissed as general “craziness”, rather than attributed to real emotional trauma. Unsane‘s iPhone cinematography is essential to pulling viewers into Sawyer’s headspace and showing just how indifferent much of the world and even well-meaning people are to her struggles. The unfiltered and uncomfortably confined visuals further establish the film’s unnerving mood, as do the POV shots from Sawyer’s perspective that further raise doubts about how much of what she is experiencing is real and not a delusion.
The script by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer (Just My Luck, The Spy Next Door) is what will probably make or break Unsane for viewers. Like most Soderbergh projects, there’s much more to Unsane that what its B movie surface would suggest. In addition to exploring how the world treats female victims of abuse, Unsane examines the dangers of running healthcare like a business and the dark side of social interactions in the digital era – something the movie demonstrates by literally showing just how invasive a simple iPhone camera can be. That’s a lot for a single film to take on, so it’s no surprise that Unsane has more success tackling certain ideas than others. Unsane is also an unabashedly schlocky film that requires more and more suspension of disbelief as it moves further along, especially once the plot twists start dropping in its second half.
Ultimately, Unsane pays off every plot point that it sets up, but its increasingly ridiculous third act will probably lose some viewers along the way. Foy’s performance fortunately prevents the movie from falling off the tracks and keeps the story compelling, even when it starts to become silly. Soderbergh’s voyeuristic photography pulls viewers into Sawyer’s mindset, but Foy’s acting is what makes the character’s fear, anger, sadness, and determination feel real and palpable. Sawyer is further served by a satisfying, if familiar, character arc that requires her to rely on her own wits to save herself when others are helpless to do so. Her performance also demonstrates Foy’s range as a screen star and bodes well for her role as Lisbeth Salander in this fall’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web.
Pharoah (Saturday Night Live) and Leonard (The Blair Witch Project) get the meatiest role after Foy, as far as the Unsane supporting cast goes. The pair are equally good in their respective roles as two men who may or may not be what they claim, further heightening the film’s paranoid atmosphere. Unfortunately, the female supporting players in Unsane – which include Juno Temple as an inmate named Violet, Amy Irving as Sawyer’s mom Angela, and Polly McKie as Nurse Boles – are underused and serve more as plot devices than engaging characters in their own right. The rest of the cast is composed of smaller name character actors who stay in the background for the majority of the film; save for a “special appearance” by a frequent Soderbergh collaborator, partway through the movie.
As far as Soderbergh’s big screen experiments go, Unsane wields mixed results but is more success than failure in the end. It similarly falls in the middle of the road, when it comes to the quality of the filmmaker’s larger body of work. Cinephiles will probably get the most out of Unsane, between its unusual photography and homages to famous works by Samuel Fuller and Stephen King, among others. It’s not a must-see in theaters and some viewers may find it almost too timely for comfort, but Unsane‘s modern outlook makes it another interesting and discussion-worthy addition to Soderbergh’s collection of genre movies.
TRAILER
Unsane begins playing in U.S. theaters nationwide on Thursday evening, March 22. It is 97 minutes long and is rated R for disturbing behavior, violence, language, and sex references.
Our Rating:
3 out of 5 (Good)
