Steven Soderbergh has tackled many genres in his long and often pioneering filmmaking career, but oddly he’s never made a full-on horror movie (the excellent and frightening epidemic thriller Contagion has come perhaps the closest until now). Unsane is Soderbergh’s take on horror and if you have hear of the movie, the one thing that every review (and thus this article) that he shot the movie entirely on his iPhone. Using his phone as his camera has mixed results: a lot fish eye lense look and a brown/grey asthetic, but the weirdly intimate nature of the phone’s images somehow make the story more personal.
The story Soderbergh has chosen to tell is that of Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy from The Crown), a young woman who has relocated from Boston to Pennsylvania to start her life over after being traumatized for two years by a stalker. Realizing that she’s still suffering psychologically, she goes to see a therapist at the Highland Creek Behavioral Center and soon finds herself a patient inside the facility after she inadvertently signs herself up for an initial voluntary 24-hour commitment that soon extends out.
Unable to leave on her own, Sawyer is befriended by a recovering opioid addict named Nate (Jay Pharaoh in probably the first dramatic role that I've ever seen him in) who helps her understand why she is there and how she can ride out her stay. But Sawyer’s plans are disrupted by the appearance of a night orderly named George Shaw (Joshua Leonard), who she is convinced is the same man who terrorized her back in Boston and has somehow followed her to Highland Creek.
That's the first act set up and in this one, the first salvo is where there’s a certain surreal nature to the course of action that lands Sawyer in the hospital that feels both horrifying and also eerily plausible. Soderburgh obviously is culling from the headlines of current events and playing on the culturally ingrained sexist attitudes about crazy women.
However, the failings of the movie occur after the first act ends and I don't want to discuss plot specifics without completely spoiling the movie. In summation, the basic set up/mystery; Is the main character who has been incarcerated in a mental hospital against their will crazy or not? is answered in a fairly pedestrian way in the second act. The finale veers into pretty standard horror tropes/territory. Soderburgh is a good enough filmmaker that at least things are shot well, but at a certain point, there is an inevitability that sinks into the climax.
On the bright side, as the lead, Foy makes Sawyer resilient and fairly savvy the complete opposite in many ways of the hapless victims that characterize these sorts. Josh Leonard, first noticed from the Blair Witch Project, is fairly compelling in a tricky role. We get Juno Temple as one of more disturbing other patients. I googled after the movie was over and saw Sawyer's determine and sympathetic mother was played by Amy Irving (the surviving high school student from the original Carrie) and lastly, one of Soderburgh's former high profile contributors has an amusing but somewhat distracting cameo as a police detective.
All in all, Soderburgh put together an interesting concept, but the movie remains somewhat clinical (at no point was I scared) and remains true to the tropes inherent in the story, the Iphone gimmick only goes so far, and the third act just falls flat. I'm interested to see how Foy portrays Lisbeth Salander in the upcoming Dragon Tattoo remake, but this movie to me warrants a "eh" 5/10.
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