Unsane ** (2018, Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Amy Irving, Polly McKie, Juno Temple, Sarah Stiles, Matt Damon) – Movie Review

Stockport-born Claire Foy stars as Boston woman Sawyer Valentini, who has relocated 400 miles away to get away from mom (Amy Irving) and start a new job, but is apparently falling to pieces. Maybe she has already fallen.

Sawyer tells a psychiatrist that she sometimes feels suicidal, and finds herself locked in a psychiatric facility/ mental institution with other nutty and distressed mental patients, apparently for her own good as she is judged a threat to herself and to others. She is befriended by Nate (Jay Pharoah), a friendly patient with a handy illicit cell phone, and encounters a friendly orderly called George (Joshua Leonard), who she is convinced is David Strine, the same obsessed stalker who got her unsane in the first place.

Of course the obvious question, posed in the tagline is, ‘Is she or isn’t she?’, Unsane that is. She seems pretty darned crazy to me, but then who I am to judge?

Unfortunately, Unsane was shot entirely with an iPhone camera, which is an interesting but boring experiment that leads director Steven Soderbergh into a cul-de-sac. The film looks good enough, though sometimes just about good enough, but the cell-phone technique is mega restricting, turning what might have been a decent little horror thriller into quite hard work. Soderbergh has an uphill task keeping it suspenseful, creepy and atmospheric, though he does make some headway. At other times the gimmick makes the movie look cheap, cramped and unimaginative. 

Phoning it in, Soderbergh is going for a 2018 version of shaky-cam the 1999 horror classic The Blair Witch Project experiment, and even employs one of its stars, Leonard, to proclaim that. The payback here is that it’s good that Leonard is so strong in this role.

It helps a lot that the four main performances by Foy, Leonard, Pharoah and Irving are all excellent. Polly McKie as Nurse Boles, Juno Temple as patient Violet and Sarah Stiles as Jill all help out too, and Matt Damon pops in briefly as a security expert. Everybody is first rate.

But, hey, we’re paying to see a cinema movie, not some cheap version of a movie on a cell-phone. It does make the film seem like an amateur effort, taking it down several degrees of good, sometimes like a student film. Of course that didn’t stop The Blair Witch Project being popular and admired, but then that’s not much of an actual film either.

The teasing script by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer is not too bad, though it plays on one note for way too long, making it seem a long 97 minutes. A proper film could have disguised flaws in the screenplay, and Bernstein and Greer must count themselves unlucky to be at the end of Soderbergh’s cell-phone treatment.

Do us a favour, Soderbergh, hang up the phone for good, and go back to making movies.

It’s quite an edgy, depressing sort of movie, by the way, and rated R for disturbing behaviour, violence, language, and sex references. It gets mileage from its tough tone, unsettling the audience nicely.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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