If last year’s Logan Lucky showed direc-
tor Steven Soderbergh shaking off thoughts
of retirement from features with evident
enjoyment, it’s harder to discern what got
him back in the director’s chair for Unsane.
A genre quickie shot on iPhones, this
lurching psycho-thriller stars a persuasively
rattled Claire Foy as Sawyer Valentini, whose
stalker complex lands her in the nuthouse.
“Rationally, I know my neuroses are colluding
with my imagination,” she tells a counselor.
“But I’m not rational.” Or is she?
The hack screenplay by Jonathan Bernstein
and James Greer gives the game away far too
early. But whether Sawyer is in the grip of
insanity or in legitimate danger, Unsane is
a dispiritedly pedestrian woman-in-peril
shocker. Full of contrived plotting and author-
ity figures too conveniently terrible at their
jobs, it grows progressively less involving
throughout its crescendo of paranoia.
One would have hoped Soderbergh might
put a mischievous contemporary spin on mad-
house classics like Shock Corridor or The Snake
Pit, or go full exploitation, demolishing Foy’s
poise by dropping her character into a lockbox
of loonies. But aside from a few shuffling cata-
tonics, that latter constituency here is chiefly
represented by Juno Temple’s Violet, a tampon-
tossing Southerner with an instant animositytoward Sawyer. Unsane doesn’t even give you
much in the way of lurid fun.
Nor does it deliver psychological complexity,
despite Foy’s commitment to a role that often
subjects her to sweaty close-ups of darting-
eyed anxiety. While she plays American with
ease, this was a dud choice for Foy’s first U.S.
film after her breakout on Netflix’s The Crown.
As the film opens, Sawyer is performing
well in her financial analyst job, but, unnerved
by fleeting glimpses of a bearded man (Joshua
Leonard) she thinks she recognizes, she seeks
help from a professional. The wrong answer to
a line of questioning about suicidal impulses
leads to her signing a consent form for vol-
untary 24-hour commitment at the Highland
Creek Behavioral Center.
Sawyer’s alarm (“This is all a terrible mis-
take!”) turns to rage as her outbursts stretch
a day into a week. Meanwhile, opioid-addicted
fellow patient Nate (SNL’s Jay Pharoah) begins
whispering about Highland’s shady business
practices. And is that night attendant the mys-
tery figure from Sawyer’s past?
The scripting becomes too predictable and
the dialogue too routine to make you care. And
it’s hard to know what to think of the choice
to shoot on iPhones. The agility of such small
cameras allows for observation of charac-
ters at close range as well as the occasional odd
angle. But unlike Sean Baker’s Tangerine, the
first film of note shot on an iPhone — in which
the visuals had both thematically appropriate
scrappiness and surprising cinematic sheen
— Unsane mostly looks drab.
In the wasteland of last summer, critics
were indulgent (audiences less so) with Logan
Lucky, perhaps in part as a welcome back to
a talent emerging from hiatus. It’s hard to
imagine even Soderbergh devotees endorsing
this minor effort with the same generosity.Unsane
Claire Foy stars as a woman
unraveling in Steven Soderbergh’s
low-budget letdown By David Rooney
As a woman suffering from paranoia — or is she? — Foy trades a crown for a mental-hospital gown.OPENS Friday, March 23 (Bleecker Street)
CAST Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah
DIRECTOR Steven Soderbergh
Rated R, 98 minutesBerlin Film
Festival