Summary
Inconsistency is what director Steven Soderbergh does best, as proven again in his secretly-shot psychological horrorUnsane(2018). The camera of choice — an iPhone — reinforces the film’s unsettling themes, with the quick-and-dirty aesthetic reflecting a fevered mind.
Reminiscent ofmovies likeShutter IslandandOne Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,Unsanedoes not tell a unique story, but still manages to be an experimental film.Set in an asylum, it revels in its grittiness and unorthodox choices.
98 minutes
Rotten Tomatoes Score
80% (based on 238 reviews)
Unsaneopens with a disquieting voiceover, in which a man tenderly expresses his feelings. The scene cuts to financial consultant Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy fromThe Crown), who is assertively dealing with a client. Her undaunted exterior cracks the next moment, when her boss suggests a work trip that is clearly not meant to be all business. It is revealed that she has recently shifted from Boston to Pennsylvania. She meets a stranger from a dating app later, and quickly lays out the terms: they can spend the night together as long as he never contacts her again. Back at her apartment, however, she pulls away from him, screaming and crying, and runs to her bathroom to take pills.
She visits a counselor at Highland Creek Behavioral Center, and shares her story: she relocated to escape a stalker named David Strine (Joshua Leonard fromThe Blair Witch Project), even after taking a restraining order against him. She had met him while she was taking care of his father in his final days. After Sawyer comments that she has the occasional thoughts of suicide, the counselor asks her to fill out forms to enroll for further therapy sessions (“just routine”). Afterward, she is suddenly asked to surrender her belongings and strip — she has been tricked into self-committal for 24 hours.
Sawyer calls the police, but they do not see any problems when they see the signed form. She spends a stressful night surrounded by unnerving characters — including the lunatic, tampon-hurling Violet (Juno Temple fromFargo) — and ends up assaulting another patient and even a staff member (“he looked like someone I knew”). Her volatile outbursts cause the staff psychiatrist to extend her stay for another seven days. It turns out, as the fellow patient (actually an undercover journalist) Nate Hoffman (Jay Pharaoh) explains to Sawyer, she is part of an insurance scam: the facility finds excuses to admit patients as long as their providers pay for their treatment. Nate advises her to avoid making a scene so her incarceration is not prolonged. However, this proves to be difficult when Sawyer discovers that David is working as an orderly under the name George Shaw.
Sawyer’s claims that her stalker has infiltrated the hospital are denied by the administration, who maintain that he is a carefully vetted nurse. The first act ofUnsaneplays theis-she-or-isn’t-she game, teasing the possibility of Sawyer actually being insane. This abruptly comes to an end when David secretly confirms his identity to her. Using Nate’s secret phone, Sawyer contacts her mother Angela (played byAmy Irving fromCarrie) and explains the entire situation. Angela arrives to get her out, but her efforts fail. David gives Sawyer a different cocktail of pills that night (which makes her have a fit), and murders Angela. He places Angela’s ring under Sawyer’s pillow to rattle her. Later, when he sees Sawyer and Nate talking, he knocks the latter unconscious and tortures him before killing him with a drug overdose. He leaves his phone under Sawyer’s pillow with images of a bruised Nate. Sawyer’s distressed warnings are ignored by the staff, who place her in solitary confinement. David then visits Sawyer, stating that he has faked that her insurance has run out, and everyone believes she has already been released.
Shooting Unsane on an iPhone
As he often does, Soderbergh did the cinematography and editing for the film himself, under the pseudonyms Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard respectively. What makesUnsanestand out is the fact that he shot it on an iPhone 7 Plus in 4K. Although he is not the first director to experiment with a phone, he is the most prominent one in the industry to use such a visual style. Shot using three iPhones and the app FiLMiC Pro, the film has an aspect ratio of 1.56:1. While a phone was used on its own for the most part, some shots required clip-on Moment lenses and a hand-held DJI stabilizer. All the camera equipment, including batteries and microphones, fit into a single backpack. As producerJoseph Malloch joked to CNET, “Our biggest logistical challenge with regard to the camera department was not misplacing the pack.”
There is no effort to hide the iPhone’s limitations, and while this creates a rather jarring effect on-screen, it suits a film where the protagonist is trapped and helpless. The erratic camera movements, background noise, distorted faces, poor lighting and extreme close-ups — all mirror the muddled emotions of Sawyer when she is confined to the dim, bare halls of the hospital. Without resorting tothe usual jump scares, Soderbergh creates tension effectively with the grainy footage, which appropriately gives off a feeling of constantly being watched. When asked about whether he would continue to shoot on iPhones,he said to IndieWire:
I’d have to have a pretty good reason not to be thinking about that first… There’s a philosophical obstacle a lot of people have about the size of the capture device. I don’t have that problem. I look at this as potentially one of the most liberating experiences that I’ve ever had as a filmmaker, and that I continue having. The gets that I felt moment to moment were so significant that this is, to me, a new chapter.
How Does Unsane End?
David beseeches Sawyer to live with him in a mountain cabin, and attacks her when she does not live up to the image he has created of her in his head. Afterward, Sawyer feigns concern about his inexperience with women, and convinces him to have sex with Violet. When he brings the latter to the padded cell, Sawyer uses Violet’s hidden shiv to stab him in the neck and flee. David kills Violet, and captures Sawyer again outside. After waking up in the trunk of his car (next to Angela’s corpse), Sawyer takes her mother’s cross necklace and jumps out. David follows her into the woods and breaks her ankle with a hammer, but she eventuallykills him with the necklaceand shiv.
Meanwhile, the body of the real George Shaw is found, which ultimately leads the police to investigate Highland’s shady business practices. After finding Nate’s old notes on the hospital’s dealings, they arrest the director.
Six months later, a recently-promoted Sawyer is having lunch with a colleague when she spots David from the back. She approaches him with a knife, but drops it and runs away when she realizes it is not her stalker after all.
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