Claire Foy Gives a Star Turn in Harrowing Unsane
Steven Soderbergh is a noodler. He won an Oscar for directing nearly 20 years ago and has spent his ..
Steven Soderbergh is a noodler. He won an Oscar for directing nearly 20 years ago and has spent his time since making genre films, doing television, announcing his retirement, and then unretiring. He’s not a dilettante, exactly; he approaches each of his projects thoroughly, with care. But he’s steadfastly refused to do anything a Respected Director of his stature is supposed to do, keeping his vision odd and particular and small rather than courting mass appeal and prestige acclaim.
Earlier this year he released a television project called Mosaic, a tidy and low-to-the-ground little murder mystery that debuted first on an app that laid out the story in fragments, then later aired in more traditional episodic form on HBO. Soderbergh didn’t write the series, but his searching, idiosyncratic stamp was all over it, everything muted and angular and curious. In that way, and others, Mosaic is akin to Unsane, Soderbergh’s new thriller film opening Friday.
Unsane’s biggest talking point is that it was shot entirely on an iPhone 7, using an app called FiLMiC Pro, a style choice that gives the film a nervy, puckish bearing. Filmed in secret, Unsane gives off a coy, half-ironic bravado—it’s right there in that teasingly dopey title—which puts the startling gruesomeness of its plot in strange relief. I’m not sure how seriously to take Unsane, even though it deals with some really serious, and timely, stuff.
Claire Foy, happily tossing off the crown, plays Sawyer Valentini (yes), a stern, one could say brittle suit whose career is on the rise, but who is otherwise a mess. She’s new to an unnamed city, and doesn’t seem to have any friends. We see her go drinking by herself, picking up a man, taking him home and then having some kind of freak-out and locking herself in the bathroom. Something is bothering Sawyer, a fact that she admirably addresses by going for a consultation with a therapist. Trouble is, the therapist is under the employ of a hospital that has a vested interest in admitting patients for 72-hour holds and draining insurance money from them. Sawyer soon finds herself caught up in that nightmare, and the movie prods us to question whether or not her version of events—and of reality—is to be trusted.
There’s another major plot element to Unsane that I’m reluctant to talk about, because I think it arrives best as a surprise. But I can tell you that Sawyer’s uncertain mental state is eventually clarified (sort of) and the film becomes a compact, sinewy thriller of imprisonment. The story could be seen as taking place in the same cinematic universe as Side Effects, Soderbergh’s terrific 2013 noir that took a similarly skeptical, maybe a little alarmist look at corruption within the medical industry. But Unsane—written by James Greer and Jonathan Bernstein—is a grimmer affair than Side Effects. Soderbergh shows us some pretty gnarly stuff, verging close to exploitation.
I enjoyed Unsane, but I’m not entirely sure how to reconcile its extremity with Soderbergh’s inherent, or at least implicit, tone. There’s often something wry about his genre-film experiments, a kind of James Franco-on-a-soap-opera quality that is supposed to be a higher being earnestly appreciating a lower form—but often instead seems like stunty slumming. I’d like to believe in Soderbergh’s good faith, but it’s hard to ignore the slight archness animating Unsane, with its jauntily insisting Thomas Newman score and comically stark visuals. And if that archness is actually there—meaning I’m not reading it wrong—I’m just not sure it’s the right timbre for an often brutal story about preyed-upon women and their tormentors.
That said, there are moments when Unsane is captivating cinema, particularly one bracing, creepy, oddly cathartic pas des deux in a rubber room that lets Foy loose at full tilt. Despite a wildly uneven “Americarrr” accent (through which the voice of Queen Elizabeth sometimes shines), Foy is excellent in the film, rigid poise giving way to feral anger in always convincing shades. Her performance in Unsane made me excited to see her as Lisbeth Salander, another furious mix of coolness and outrage. And what else might Foy do, now that she’s rid of the skirt suits and the corgis? She’s freed herself from Buckingham Palace and now a mental institution. I can’t wait to see what other places she decides to fully inhabit and then gloriously escape in the years to come.
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