Review: Unsane (2018)

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Steven Soderbergh’s latest micro-feature starring The Crown’s Claire Foy and SNL alumni Jay Pharoah plays in the genre sandbox with a tale of a stalker finding the object of his desire in a morally and financially corrupt mental health clinic.

Steven Soderbergh is probably best known for his big budget tentpole blockbusters like the Ocean’s Eleven Trilogy and award winning dramas like Traffic and Erin Brokovich. But at the same time, he’s carved a solid niche for himself producing thought provoking microfeatures in various genres. He’s explored pulp exploitation action in films like Haywire, deconstructed the erotic thriller in The Girlfriend Experience and weird small town explorations like Bubble. In Unsane, Soderbergh explores the topic of for profit care centers taking advantage of insurance loopholes as the backdrop for this micro genre thriller.

Foy plays a career woman named Sawyer Valentinii, a woman who is trying to rebuild her life after a stalker forces her to move and rebuild her life from scratch. After a one-night stand gone awry, Sawyer visits a behavioral health center, where she muses to her psychiatrist that she often has suicidal ideations and has fantasized about how she would commit suicide. This is enough in the age of oversharing to get her involuntarily committed for 24 hours. As she struggles with this would-be error, she assaults a patient and gets into heated exchanges with a fellow inmate (Juno Temple), that leads to her involuntary commitment being stretched out to the length of 7 days. Along the way, she makes friends with a fellow patient (Jay Pharoah) who tries to council her to make her time go by quickly and put her head down. Unfortunately, it just so happens that Sawyer’s stalker David (played with creepy effect by The Blair Witch Project’s Joshua Leonard) is an orderly at this hospital and sees this as the perfect chance to make Sawyer his, through medication and control.

Much has been made of the fact that Unsane was shot entirely on an iPhone 7S Plus. For the most part, the fidelity looks like standard early digital cinema. Soderbergh utilizes fish-eye anamorphic lenses to try and get more depth and scope out of the iPhones camera, as well as colored gels, giving the bulk of the early part of the film a weird septic yellow unearthly feel. The effect becomes less noticeable as the film progresses and could prove to be a viable means of micro-feature filmmaking in the future. That being said, Unsane does feel like a film that would’ve benefited more from being a short. At feature length, many of the seams in its story become more apparent, including how many events in the film are pure coincidence versus design. Leonard and Foy give great performances, with Leonard playing the stalker David as a cross between Annie Wilkes from Misery and Psycho’s Norman Bates. Foy excels at playing a character who is perhaps too smart for her own good; the mind games she utilizes to try and escape her scenario becoming disturbing as the film progresses where you think a role reversal between protagonist and antagonist might happen and the film’s denouement gives the appearance that might not seem so far off. Jay Pharoah’s role is alsoa big revelation, as he shows some dramatic chops that wouldn’t have been apparent from his run on Saturday Night Live.

Ultimately, Unsane works more than it doesn’t. Its iPhone as camera gimmick doesn’t define the film as a gimmick curiosity due to strong performances by its leads and its definitely worth a viewing despite some flaws in plot and writing behind its setting.