Unsane (2018)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
A woman is involuntarily committed to a mental institution where she is confronted by her greatest fear.
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The third act hurtles with developments akin to vintage Brian De Palma misanthropy, and the screenplay (by Soderbergh confederates Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer) is a perfidious mélange of Polanski (“Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby”), Forman (“One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”) and 1970s paranoia melodramas, especially “Three Days of the Condor,” the final shot of which is copied in full .
Soderbergh delights in confusing the truth for a spell, particularly in a weird, frenzied sequence that plays like a psych-ward remix of Roman Polanski’s classic “Repulsion.”
Acting as his own cinematographer (and editor) as usual, Soderbergh creates an atmosphere of suffocating lunacy and inescapable paranoia that takes a few cues from Repulsion .
It's a wonderful performance that recalls nothing less than Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion .
And it’s the propulsive force of her bracing spite and nastiness that allows us, for a time at least, to overlook the derivative story ( Shock Corridor and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest loom large) and the gaping plot chasms.
In Unsane, the paternalistic mental institution becomes a ripe site for these ideas – unlike the best-known psychiatric conspiracy film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, here lies the intersection of pathology and misogyny, for a woman’s loss of control over her life and her mind.
The third act hurtles with developments akin to vintage Brian De Palma misanthropy, and the screenplay (by Soderbergh confederates Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer) is a perfidious mélange of Polanski (“Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby”), Forman (“One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”) and 1970s paranoia melodramas, especially “Three Days of the Condor,” the final shot of which is copied in full .
However, the screenwriting tandem of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer ( The Spy Next Door ) starts with a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest vibe before offering a muddled exploration of knee-jerk psychology and a half-hearted indictment of greed and corruption within the health insurance industry.
Inside, the atmosphere is only a shade tamer than “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or “Shock Corridor.”
That story would be fascinating in and of itself, Soderbergh and his writers giving things a surreal, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Shock Corridor feel I can’t help but think is intentional.
Co-writers Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer have crafted Unsane as Misery inverted and spliced with A Cure for Wellness , as Sawyer (played with nail-biting intensity by Claire Foy) is slowly immobilized by systems designed to subjugate or silence her, which profit from turmoil and deception.
The setup is similar to last year’s A Cure for Wellness, but just as Soderbergh chooses real-world sterility over widescreen opulence, he forgoes gothic flourish for decisive answers — which, admittedly, come earlier than expected.
One lurid recent example is Martin Scorsese’s “ Shutter Island ” (2010), which is set in an asylum for the criminally insane, and Soderbergh, like Scorsese, delights in the narrative opportunities that are afforded by mental illness.
Like Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor, Unsane plays with these questions—until, about halfway through, it doesn’t, and instead lays its cards on the table and becomes a fairly conventional (if nasty) horror story.
Following the genre template (Shock Corridor, Shutter Island, American Horror Story: Asylum), Sawyer befriends one fellow patient (SNL's Jay Pharoah) and jousts with another (Juno Temple, dialed up to 11).
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That’s the premise of Unsane, veteran director Stephen Soderbergh’s latest, and it seems like somewhat of a departure for a filmmaker whose eclectic body of work range from films such as Erin Brockovich (2000) to Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen (2001, 2004 and 2007).
As in “Haywire” and “Side Effects,” he takes what easily might have been a lowbrow genre entry and realizes it so completely that he turns it into something extraordinary.
Generally speaking, we could say that the film has two ideas on its mind: first, it wants to be an indictment of the for-profit medical industry (making it a cousin to Soderbergh's 2013 Side Effects , made before he retired), with fellow patient Nate (Jay Pharaoh, by leaps and bounds the best thing about the movie) suggesting that the hospital is basically just a front for bilking insurance companies.
That gives it a thematic connection to Soderbergh’s far more effective “Side Effects,” which played on contemporary suspicions about big pharma and the physicians who sell their souls to it.
Unsane is very much in the mold of the low-budget, experimental films he’s pumped out over his career, including digital-video experiments like Full Frontal and Bubble, and cheap-yet-deep genre exercises like Haywire and Side Effects.
It slides smoothly into Soderbergh's filmography — in fact, if his 2013 flick Side Effects met his excellent TV series The Knick, it might look something like this.
But if you’re going to pinpoint any trademarks of Soderbergh authorship, you may default to grime and existential unrest—the sort plotted about his filmography from his debut picture Sex, Lies, and Videotape to his pre-hiatus send-off Side Effects, not to mention his short-lived small screen jaunt The Knick.
Back in 2014, Sean Baker, the director of last year’s wonderful The Florida Project , shot his breakout feature Tangerine on three iPhone 5s, and it was overwhelmingly considered to be a big deal.
Soderbergh isn’t the first filmmaker to do this (“The Florida Project” director Sean Baker beat him to it by several years with 2015’s “Tangerine”), but it’s a novel and interesting tool for him.
Of course, some readers might remember that “ The Florida Project ” director Sean Baker already beat him to this particular punch with 2015’s “ Tangerine ,” which was photographed with an iPhone 5 but used anamorphic lens adapters and extensive color-correction to create a vivid, shimmery sheen that often passed for the work of a much larger camera.
Before The Florida Project, director Sean Baker used iPhone 5s for tawdry illumination in 2015s Tangerine.
The Claire Foy-starring “Unsane” is not the first feature film to be shot on an iPhone (“ The Florida Project ” auteur Sean Baker made 2015 indie darling “Tangerine” the same way), but it’s the highest in profile by far, with distributor Bleecker Street rolling out its incongruously sparkling 4K resolution and scuzzy mental hospital aesthetic on more than 2,000 screens in North America.
When another British TV favorite, Benedict Cumberbatch, played Doctor Strange, his acting was apt and bright but his generic American accent blunted his usual flair.
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Neither overheated and over-calculated, like Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, nor frigid and laminated, like David Fincher’s Gone Girl, it resembles Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor mixed with elements of Neil Jordan’s scandalously ignored In Dreams.
Even in the context of a filmography that’s long betrayed a self-identification with con artists ( the Ocean’s movies , Side Effects , The Informant! , the recent Logan Lucky , etc.), the manipulations here seem pointed: In its best moments, Unsane is a film about the forced denial of trauma.
Unsane, the director's second film in his un-retirement, following the lanky heist film Logan Lucky , is the latest in the proud tradition of Full Frontal , Bubble, and The Girlfriend Experience : a film made to be as powerfully ugly as possible, as a demonstration of the current state of low-fi recording technology to capture something about the grubby realness of life.
Steven Soderbergh’s return to feature filmmaking after a brief “retirement” resulted in the delicious heist comedy “Logan Lucky” last year, and now brings “Unsane,” a grubby psychothriller whose ultimate claim to fame might be that it was shot entirely on a smartphone (wielded by the director himself under his usual nom de camera Peter Andrews).
Unsane, Steven Soderbergh’s second post-“retirement” movie (following Logan Lucky ) offers such an experience.
Soderbergh announced his retirement as a filmmaker five years ago but never really stopped working; he just switched to television for a bit before returning to the big screen in 2017 with Logan Lucky.
Formally flawless and bursting at the seams with shaggy charisma, last year’s Logan Lucky perfectly articulated why the big screen missed Steven Soderbergh so much after only five years estranged therefrom.