Unsane is unlike any movie I’ve ever seen. Legendary director
Steven Soderbergh has decided to abandon typical Hollywood filmmaking styles
with this movie. Instead, he shot it all on an iPhone 7 with harsh natural
lighting, and bizarre angles you can only accomplish by throwing your phone
across a room. Now, I’ve seen weird iPhone projects before, just never on this
scale. This is a big, studio-backed, wide-released feature length film. Its
leads are The Crown’s Clair Foy and SNL’s Jay Pharaoh, two big stars in
their own right, and it’s shot by the man who once beat himself for the Oscar
for best director. This high profile nature is part of what makes Unsane
so bizarre, and ultimately rather
off-putting.
Foy stars as a young woman who accidentally commits herself
to a shady mental health facility after attempting to seek help for PTSD
symptoms she’s faced following a stalking incident in her hometown. Once there,
she begins experiencing firsthand how the hospital mistreats their patients and
staff, and she learns that they’re more interested in collecting insurance
money than in helping people. A few spooky asylum movie tropes later, Foy now
finds herself face to face with her stalker once more, only this time in the
form of one of her doctors, and Hamlet-style game of “is she crazy
or is she telling the truth” ensues. At the same time, the movie pushes on
through with more bonkers imagery and mental-patients-are-scary story beats
we’ve seen in countless schlocky exploitation movies before.
The thing is, though, Unsane doesn’t think it’s an
exploitation film most of the time. Being a modern thriller about abuse and
mental health, it has to walk the typical egg shell tightrope of “is this in
poor taste” that all these types of movies have to tread. In the case of Unsane, it’s kinda hard to tell if they
stick the landing. The tone shifts wildly back and forth between handling the
subject matter with care and treating it like a campy grindhouse-style B-horror
movie. It’s ultimately hard to pin down exactly what it is this movie’s trying
to say about mental health, if anything. It honestly might just be using it to
be a spooky setting, which is fine if that’s the tone it’s going for. It just
needs to decide. There’s a difference between an exploitation genre movie and
one that’s just exploitative.
The camera work is straight-up nuts, which I mostly appreciated.
This is an experimental film, and so it experiments with how a scene can be
shot and edited. Sometimes that lands, sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s okay.
For Soderbergh, it seems to be less about results and more about figuring out
how far we’ll let him go. A typical not-shot-on-a-phone movie might cover a
scene with two close ups and perhaps a wide shot for perspective. Maybe some
flashier camera moves as well if it’s a particularly stylized project. In Unsane,
scenes are covered with a shot/reverse shot, wide shot, wide shot from the
other side of the room, and a semi-obscured close up shot where the phone is
just sitting on the table between the actors, all of which are cut to rapidly
and seemingly at random. It’s almost dizzying and at times hypnotic, like the
cameras were being directed by squirrels. Considering that this is a film about
insanity and stalking, it seems right that it feels like the camera has been
hidden in places it doesn’t belong. Sometimes it feeds into the style nicely. Again,
this movie is, more than anything, an interesting experiment.
The performances are fine. Foy swings wildly for the fences,
which sometimes works for her character and other times aggressively doesn’t.
Her American accent is also distractingly off. Jay Pharaoh, on the other hand,
is charismatic as hell and absolutely shines with every second he’s on the
screen.
It’s honestly baffling to me that this movie is getting a
wide release. I can’t imagine general audiences enjoying this at all, let alone
being able to even watch it, considering how strange it looks. This is in every
way and experiment and should be treated as one. There are a few conventionally
thrilling moments, and the campier spooky hospital segments were fun, but
ultimately the biggest takeaway for me was how it looked. And it looked nuts.
2.5 out of 5
