Since his 1989 debut, sex, lies and videotape, writer-director Steven Soderbergh has been impossible to categorize.
If anything, Soderbergh’s best films often mine multiple film genres at once, and almost always include some sort of social commentary, even when it’s meticulously camouflaged beneath a pulpy, popcorn sheen.
But he’s never attempted a horror-thriller, until now.
Unsane is the story of Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy), a young female professional who has just relocated more than 400 miles for a job. The reason why, which is slowly explained, is that Sawyer had caught the eye of a stalker, a man named David Strine (Joshua Leonard, The Blair Witch Project), who bombarded her to the point she had to flee.
David’s unwanted advances basically created an emotional K-hole that she is unable to escape. As Unsane opens, Sawyer believes she has seen David at her new job, which causes her a wave of anxiety, just before she's called into her new boss’s office, where he hits on her, suggesting they travel together to a work conference.
It's not the fresh start she was hoping for. Unable to trust and/or relate to men, Sawyer has no interest in cheating with a married man. She's taken to online hookups to satiate her basic, primal needs and clear her head for a brief respite.
Soderbergh captures this quixotic conundrum perfectly by showing Sawyer’s reaction to a new suitor, whom she meets later that night at a bar. She makes awkward jokes about her father dying of cancer and offers random, off-putting asides — "Hail, Satan," she flippantly tells the suitor.
It’s clear she’s a damaged, broken shell.
“Tonight is going to go how you want,” she tells the man, “but after, don’t call or contact me.”
The next day, still shaken by the thought that she saw David, Sawyer visits a local behavioral facility where she describes in detail how she would kill herself if she thought David had discovered her once again. The counselor tricks her into voluntarily signing up for a 24-hour commitment for evaluation. And that’s when the true terror starts.
David, it turns out, has relocated as well, and changed his identity. He’s now called "George," and somehow has a job as an orderly at the same behavioral facility. As soon as Sawyer sees him, she melts down and becomes violent, which allows the facility to extend her stay up to seven days, against her wishes and her pleas to be believed.
Once remanded, Sawyer meets the residents of the psych ward, which include Nate (former Saturday Night Live veteran Jay Pharoah) and Violet (a deliciously unhinged Juno Temple). Nate explains to Sawyer that she fell victim to a scam whereby the facility tricked her into saying she was suicidal, which allows it to hold her and bill her insurance company. Once her insurance runs out, they will let her go.
All Sawyer has to do is bide her time and behave, he says, but there’s still the issue of David/George for her to contend with.
Leonard might seem an unlikely choice for such a high-profile role. While he has worked consistently since The Blair Witch Project, this is by far his biggest film role in years, and he makes the most of it, imbuing David with an unnerving, genuine creepiness that’s perfectly paired with the more traditional, and queasy, machinations of a stalker.
David/George, for instance, knows when Sawyer’s mother, Angela (Amy Irving, making a welcome return), arrives at the facility, demanding that her daughter be set free, and he tracks Angela back to her motel. He manipulates Sawyer’s medication, causing her to hallucinate. He knows how to turn off specific surveillance cameras throughout the facility.
Soderbergh deftly balances a host of subplots while keeping the focus squarely on Sawyer and her plight. For example, he explores Nate’s background, which is tied to how the facility exploits insurance benefits to profit off patients, revealing a vital secret that Nate carefully concealed from facility administrators. He uses an unexpected A-list-actor cameo to explain all the ways that people allow stalkers to prosper and flourish through technology in our digital age.
Such tasty red-meat topics help flesh out what is essentially a B-grade drive-in thriller without detracting from the pulpy freakshow playing out on-screen.
Unsane is both vintage Soderbergh, in that regard, and a technological level-up from his previous work. Much has been made about the director’s decision to shoot the majority of Unsane on an iPhone 7 Plus, which has 4K digital capture capability, and allows for the use of various lens attachments.
To his credit, the film looks fantastic. In almost every outdoor shot, Soderbergh positions his phone camera to appear as if the audience is viewing Sawyer as a stalker would, from a distance, often with parts of the frame blocked out by tree branches or an exterior building wall.
The ripple effect for viewers is noticeable.
Unsane is claustrophobic, and nerve-shredding, at times. It’s also infuriating in its depiction of how the healthcare system can be manipulated by unethical providers and maddening in the palpable frustration that Sawyer feels at having her basic rights ignored.
For horror fans, Unsane is both a nostalgic return to a traditional genre trope (bad things always happen in an asylum) and a refreshing roller-coaster plunge into unexpected territory. Throughout, Soderbergh never pumps the brakes long enough for his audience to correctly answer a core question — is Sawyer just batshit crazy, or a sympathetic victim whose life is unraveling before our eyes?
Don’t look for, or expect, answers, especially in the movie’s closing moments. Soderbergh almost gleefully rips the rug out yet again just as the screen fades to black.
This article appears in Mar 22-29, 2018.