Steven Soderbergh’s Cutting Edge, Throwback Thriller ‘Unsane’ [Berlin Review]

With perhaps the very faintest of asterisks beside “Haywire” and “The Girlfriend Experience” (and please don’t @ me if you’re fans of those films, they’re fine) Steven Soderbergh couldn’t make a bad film if he tried. That is a relief because most people choosing to deliver a lurid psych-thriller-meets-exploitation-flick shot entirely on an iPhone could be accused of trying very hard to make a bad film. Given the parameters, “Unsane” is vast deal better than it should be. It’s pulpy and nasty and surprisingly slick, featuring a terrific, Salander-casting-justifying central turn from Claire Foy. But that really is given those parameters, and when you get the feeling that the parameters are the reason there’s a movie here at all — that it was the limitations and challenges of this formal experiment that drew Soderbergh to the project, much more than the burning desire to tell this particular story — you get a strange feeling of looking for the cart behind the horse, but finding it up front.

Simply put, if you’re in the Saturday night date mood to see a high-concept, formulaic horror-thriller with some slashery gore and a pretty high body count, this is one of the better ones we’ve seen in a while, image quality notwithstanding. But if you’re looking forward to the next inquisitorial, curious Soderbergh joint, once you get past the “Cool! He can shoot on an iPhone!” thing, there’s not a lot to grab on to. In terms of its story, in Soderbergh’s canon, “Unsane” ranks closest to “Side Effects,” a film I remember enjoying, but only on the rare occasions I remember that I’ve seen it. And I think I’ve seen it twice. 

The most incisive element of “Unsane” is probably its potent and unsettling insight into the mind of a stalker, which is exactly where we begin. Over blurry, blue-toned footage of a nighttime forest, a voice intones a message of love. But the love described is all wrong. It’s too forceful, too absolute and its object is not a person, just a blue dress filled with the projected desires of the speaker. We soon learn that the repository for those desires is Foy’s claims analyst Sawyer Valentini (surely rivalling Reynolds Woodcock for the movie name of the year to date). Sawyer’s elfin face and huge liquid-crystal eyes belie a snappish, prickly temperament, that only softens temporarily within the frame of her phone’s camera when she calls her mom (Amy Irving) to lie to her about how happy and popular she is. She meets a Tinder date for a one-night stand, but has a sudden panic attack during their makeout session.

The next day, she answers an ad for counselling services offered to victims of stalking. At the clinic, she signs some release forms, which, unbeknownst to her, empower the shady business to keep her and treat her for seven days, alongside several other patients including: the truly disturbed Violet (Juno Temple);  the benignly resigned Nate (Jay Pharaoh, in a nice turn despite being a bit Token Black Friend); and the others like her, scammed into self-committal so the clinic can grift her insurance. This loss of autonomy is bad enough, but then her stalker David (a genuinely creepy Joshua Leonard) turns up as an orderly in the place. Or is it him? Perhaps it’s (tiny little sigh) all in her mind.

The “Gaslight” meets “Gothika” insurance fraud scheme, which falls somewhere between Kafka and Heller for sheer ironic perversity, is convincingly sold: a frighteningly plausible way for less than scrupulous healthcare businesses (because there are actually some of those!) to bilk insurers out of money while medicating  perfectly healthy people into a state where they very well might question their sanity. Oddly enough, this means before it flirts with torture porn down the line, in its medical-thriller stages, the film is essentially a cautionary tale against being overinsured, at a time when so much of the political debate in America is about the underinsured or the uninsured.

It’s an interesting inversion, but it points to the many ways “Unsane” skirts hot button issues, always within glancing distance, but never embracing the opportunity to make a lasting comment on the world. One would imagine Sawyer’s stalker-victim story and the long-view of this tale as her learning to face her very worst fears in an almost ridiculously literal no-escape way, would have special relevance to our #MeToo times. But it feels no more informed by real connection to present-day society than a splashy ’90s psychothriller, a genre that, despite the newness of its tech approach, “Unsane ” most resembles. Topicality is not mandatory, and it’s clear the agenda here is for salacious genre thrills rather than anything deeper or more profound, but when the film’s form is such an embrace of modernity, it feels like cognitive dissonance to have the story skew so old-fashioned. 

Along with a curiously uninteresting generic-electro score that sounds a little like stock music, this is the most disappointing aspect of the film. Soderbergh can deliver slick entertaining storytelling in his sleep (perhaps that’s just what he did he did with “Side Effect,” you’d have to ask someone who’s seen it). But while it does go some way to establish a new iPhone aesthetic in which foregrounds are distended and there’s a slight fisheye distortion on some of the medium shots, otherwise the novel shooting method doesn’t ever impact on the telling of the story. Doesn’t that just make it a gimmick?

There’s no real investigation of how the very ubiquity of the tech used to make this film might have altered our relationships to each other and affected our psychologies — our very unsanity — on a fundamental level. Our microchipped brains and hotwired attention spans form no part of the film’s world. Even the stalking is analogue, fleshy, offline — it’s about a person physically lurking behind you in the dark or coming at you with a shiv. There’s scarcely a reference to a digital component (except for a few careless mentions of Facebook and a hasty “block caller” scene) that might make it relevant to the cyberstalking era. Considering how very much his last experiment, “Mosaic,” especially in its app version, was involved with finding ways for storytelling itself to adapt to new forms, it’s a shame Soderbergh couldn’t have applied that same experimental curiosity to the narrative of “Unsane.” It all does prompt the basic question: why shoot “Unsane” on an iPhone? Answer: just because he could. And so he did, and it was fun — now, what were talking about again? [B-]

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