Unsane (2018)
A young woman is involuntarily committed to a mental
institution, where she is confronted by her greatest fear--but is it
real or a product of her delusion?
Director:
Steven SoderberghStars:
Country:
USALanguage:
EnglishRelease Date:
23 March 2018 (USA) See more »Also Known As:
Niepoczytalna See more »Company Credits
Production Co:
Soderbergh’s iPhone-shot film boasts an excellent Claire Foy as a woman
trapped in a psychiatric facility – but it’s ridiculous in all the wrong
ways.
Steven Soderbergh has ventured into the world of psychiatric grand guignol before, with his excellent 2013 thriller Side Effects.
But this movie, from screenwriters Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer –
known for comedy – is ultimately ridiculous in all the wrong ways. It’s
a crazily broad, brash exploitation horror-thriller shot on an iPhone,
with creeped-out distorted cinematography, menacingly low lighting, and
pastiche midnight-movie design effects. The film has a ragbag of themes
including stalking, mental illness and the private medical insurance
racket; these competing ideas cancel each other out and aren’t scary.
And yet it has to be said that before things escalate into anarchic silliness, Unsane does pack a punch. Claire Foy
brings a fierce commitment to the role of Sawyer Valentini, a woman on
the verge of a nervous breakdown – in fact, well over the verge. She has
moved to a new city with a new identity to escape a stalker. Matt Damon
has a cameo as the cop advising her on security: locks, bars, deleting
her social media accounts etc. But she is a complete wreck – unable to
form friendships or relationships – and to her hospital-based
psychotherapist she one day ill-advisedly appears to confess to having
suicidal thoughts. This therapist coolly asks her to sign a document,
which she thinks is just committing her to more sessions. But suddenly
big white-coated men lead her to a locked room. And in that secure
facility, she becomes convinced that the attendant nurse is actually her
stalker.
There is of course hardly anything more worrying than the idea of
unjustly being incarcerated in this way and that your increasingly
frantic and enraged complaints will be taken as proof of madness. It is
moreover not necessarily a problem that mental health issues are treated
here with absolute lack of taste; it is the prerogative of satires or
black comedies or scary movies to offend, to lead us down the shock
corridor of provocation. But the absurdity and the galaxy of plot holes
in the farcical final act just undermine everything.
Foy keeps things watchable – up to a point. But the
commitment of her performance from the outset encourages us to invest
wrongly in a believable drama and a plausible situation, and she can’t
make up for the film’s descent into pantomime. The
is-she-or-isn’t-she-crazy theme, as summarised by that quibbling title,
is not a very tense or interesting dilemma – at least, not as it is
finally hammed up here – and is solved perfunctorily by means of another
character: Sawyer’s mother, played by Amy Irving, who is drawn into
this grisly circle of hell.
In fact, Unsane is at its most effective when it is satirising the
duplicitous world of the private medical facilities, the insurers, and
the short-term incarceration industry. The icily self-serving
corporatespeak of the hospital’s director is thoughtfully achieved and
Polly McKie’s performance as the Ratched-like Nurse Boles is very
intimidating. She is actually a rather potent character, but crowded out
of the drama by the nurse played by Joshua Leonard. Juno Temple
is landed with the role of a malign wild-child patient, another part of
the film that succeeds in being unsubtle and a little bit feeble.
It’s a shame: Foy shows that she’s more than just the queen – she
could be great in a Soderbergh comedy such as Logan Lucky. But Unsane
delivers only unsuccess.
- Unsane is showing at the Berlin film festival and will be released in cinemas on 23 March
Thanks for reading and have fun watching movies.
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