Unsane: Film Review

Unsane: Film Review

Cast: Claire Foy, Juno Temple, Joshua Leonard
Director: Steven Soderbergh

Lo-fi and a bit grubby in parts, director Steven Soderbergh's Unsane continues both his obsession with psychological pieces and his apparent crusade against medicare in the USA.

The Crown's Claire Foy is Sawyer Valentini, a victim of a stalker in Boston and who's recently moved to Pennsylvania to start anew.
However, troubled by visions of her attacker, David Strine, she heads to Highland Creek Behavioural centre for help - and ends up inadvertently voluntarily checking in for an overnight stay.

Determined to get through the night, Valentini finds her incarceration extended when she lashes out at a guard, believing it to be her stalker.

But, is she crazy?

Unsane's claustrophobic feel contributes much to the overall execution, and anchored by Foy's strong turn, it feels like something likely to get under your skin.

However, the "shot on an iPhone" look and feel occasionally muddies the waters, and numbs the viewer to what's going on - certainly, in the final 15 minutes, Soderbergh seems determined to throw away the Hitchcockian paranoia to achieve nothing but horror shocks.
It's not that these are not effective in the final fun, but merely the number of them thrown at the viewer means each loses impact as the film reaches its hysterical finale.

Soderbergh can't resist throwing in some low level commentary over how medical companies treat facilities and appears to follow up his crusade from Side Effects; it's an interesting slant on it, and would have been all the better had it been fleshed out a little more and threaded a bit better within.

Ultimately, Unsane is anchored by Foy's impressive turn; part victim, part empowerment, she's all class and uncertainty as the pieces don't measure up and the puzzle doesn't quite come together for her.

Soderbergh's Unsane is yet again proof of a director trying to shake things up, and while it's effective in parts, the final execution and narrative decisions made place some of it squarely in capable B-movie territory.