Unsane (2018) We tried as hard as we could to resist using a flagrant, sarcastic opening line for this review, something like "Director Steven Soderbergh phones it in..."......since he famously shot most of this film on an IPhone 7.......
Uh oh.....we just printed that, didn't we? Ooops, we did it again......
We'll not harp on the IPhone stuff......if it hadn't been well publicized in every friggin' review of "Unsane", with our barely-there eyesight, we never would have known anyway.
Visually, it didn't look any different to us than the last 1000 or so independent films we've viewed......for all we know, Soderbergh could have been using a 1958 Kodak Brownie or a Viewmaster....
(You young 'uns can feel free to google those last two references in order to savor BQ's sparkling wit......)
Let's speak of the movie itself, shall we? It's kind of a suspense, semi-horror thriller that takes a nice big healthy swat at everyone's most despised villains....the health care and insurance industries.....
Claire Foy (of "The Crown") plays a nervous, high strung woman named Sawyer Valentini......not only is the poor girl saddled with a name that sounds left over from one of the 'Star Wars' prequels, she's deathly afraid of a psychotic stalker from whom she's fled to another town to escape.
As if that wasn't enough woe for her, Sawyer's visit to a counseling therapist ends with her inadvertently committing herself to a day of mental health examination. Her short fuse temper and outraged, Type A personality quickly earn her an enforced ,involuntary 7 days in the cuckoo's nest, complete with all the perks...... like being tied down in her bed and heavily sedated.
(It's later revealed, in case you hadn't already guessed that this particular funny farm is running a massive scam designed to plunder their freshly incarcerated patients for their insurance company benefits. Oh my.....is such a horrible idea even possible in this day and age.....heh, heh, heh...)
Can things get any worse for her? Oh, you bet your Nurse Ratched they can......since her quietly lunatic stalker (Joshua Leonard) has infiltrated the place as an orderly-attendant, beloved by all the staff for his friendly demeanor and dedicated work ethic.
Claire Foy tears into this role with full force and Leonard (one of hapless hikers in "The Blair Witch Project") gives the deeply loony-toons psycho an implacable sense of chilling calm.......(the solitary confinement scene where the always enraged Foy manages to finally pierce his delusions is the film's major high point....)
As inventive and skillful as Steven Soderbergh is with actors, you start to realize this film's really just another terror filled hunt-and-chase, back-and-forth duel between a harried heroine and her relentless tormentor, Structurally, it's not much different from a typical 1970's slasher movie (And the film's final freeze frame is straight out of that decade.....)
Foy's histrionics kept us glued to it, though and Soderbergh, no matter what kind of equipment he's using to shoot his movies, knows how to smartly put together a film and tell a compelling story.. Not bad at all (3 stars - ***)......with even a surprise cameo from a Major Movie Star.......
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