Unsane
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Starring Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah
Rated R
You could summarize “Unsane” as Steven Soderbergh screwing around, and you wouldn’t be wrong.
It is a stylistic experiment and a self-imposed challenge, like so much else in the career of the brilliant filmmaker, who most recently made the miniseries “Mosaic,” which originated as an interactive smartphone app before coming to HBO in January.
This feature film, Soderbergh’s second since returning to the medium after announcing his retirement from directing movies in 2013, is a horror-thriller set in a psychiatric institution, shot on the sly last year entirely on an iPhone.
Soderbergh isn’t the first filmmaker to do this (“The Florida Project” director Sean Baker beat him to it by several years with 2015’s “Tangerine”), but it’s a novel and interesting tool for him.
It’s ideal because of the way it allows the filmmaker to maximize his legendarily innate understanding of cinematic language and to enhance his career-long fascination with melding elements of fiction and reality into hybrids that are unlike anything anywhere else.
The freedom from the constraints typically associated with genre movies like this one allows Soderbergh to utilize a spare and invasive approach.
It takes the movie out of the realm of fiction to such an extent that the atmosphere of fear and confusion, as it’s experienced by protagonist Sawyer Valentini (brilliantly played by Claire Foy, in a part that’s about as far removed from “The Crown” as conceivable), manifests in uniquely unsettling ways.
Sawyer is involuntarily committed after what she thought would be a routine therapy visit and then struck by the horrifying realization that the facility has unknowingly hired her stalker (Joshua Leonard) under an assumed name, and simply won’t listen to her about his true identity.
The movie is dark and ominous, finding its heart in poorly-lit, soul-crushing hospital wards and an endless array of treatments and checkups with sinister figures in white coats, or administrative figures who just want to do what’s best for you, of course.
It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, escapist entertainment. While the screenplay, by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, follows a generally conventional three-act structure, it’s clear throughout “Unsane” that Soderbergh’s much less interested in those particulars.
He is all about using ubiquitous everyday technology against itself, exploiting an everyday smartphone to make a movie that captures the emotional hazards of life in the social media age and its inability to offer us a place to hide.
