UNSANE (15) ***

Dir: Steven Soderbergh

With: Claire Foy, Juno Temple, Joshua Leonard

Runtime: 98 minutes

LONG may Steven Soderbergh’s boredom threshold stay as high as a gnat’s eye. The Erin Brockovich director, who can swing between a biopic of Che Guevara one year and a comedy about male strippers next, once said he was done making movies for the big screen, only to return with the charmer that was 2017’s Logan Lucky.

Now he is back again with another talking point picture, a psychological thriller shot on an iPhone over a couple of weeks. Starring Claire “the head that wears The Crown” Foy as a woman locked up in an asylum against her will, Unsane is a Gaslight for the smartphone era. Equal parts inspired and infuriating, it is a movie that makes it a point of principle to mess with the heads of viewers.

When we first meet Foy’s Sawyer Valentini (crazy name, but is she a crazy gal?) she is being brusque on the phone to a customer of her data analysis service. Next she is brushing off an advance from her sleazy boss, then it’s off on an internet date. A confident woman, in short.

But she ends the evening locked in her bathroom, panicking. Sawyer, it emerges, has only recently moved from Boston to Pennsylvania to escape the man who has been stalking her for two years.

Finding a counselling service, Sawyer goes along, talks about her distress, and signs up for what she thinks is a series of outpatient sessions.

In reality, she has involuntarily committed herself for 24 hours. Realising her error, she bargains, she pleads, she plays along in the hope of getting out as soon as possible, but as her nightmare goes from one day to seven and onwards still, she looks for a way to escape. Why is she being kept there? Who benefits from doing an Ingrid Bergman on her?

Soderbergh and his writing team of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer (Just My Luck, The Spy Next Door) dispense answers early on, leaving the movie to stand or fall on the story as a whole. The tale is ridiculous, its ambition to do for America’s private healthcare system what the comedy horror Get Out did for racism far exceeding its writers’ abilities.

The story is not the point of Unsane, though. The real attractions here are Foy’s performance and how the film was shot.

Soderbergh is not the first to swap a camera for a camera phone. That distinction went to Sean Baker who made 2015’s Tangerine on iPhone 5s. Baker went on to helm the Oscar-nominated The Florida Project, so it was clearly good training.

In both Tangerine (a comedy-drama about a prostitute out for revenge against an unfaithful partner) and Unsane, the shooting method suits the freewheeling, paranoia-fuelled madness on screen. When we see Foy out on the street, the scenes look snatched and covert, as if it was her stalker filming.

The gonzo production style (even extending to the camera knocking a table off balance at one point) plays into the anything goes/anything might happen, mood. As a way of making films, it would not work in most instances, despite what Soderbergh has said about how simple it was to do. One cannot imagine his earlier hits, Out of Sight, for example, or the Oceans series, looking too good if shot on iPhones. Not everyone, moreover, is as accomplished an editor and cinematographer as Soderbergh.

If the production method is a touch hit and miss, Foy’s performance is an out and out triumph. Though there are notable turns among the supporting cast (particularly Jay Pharoah as a fellow inmate), Foy dominates the movie, being in almost every scene. Throwing off her previous persona as the cool, rational, always polite Queen as if it was on fire, she creates a doozy of a character in Sawyer. Alternately vulnerable and manipulative, bullied and a bully, decent and demonic, the audience is kept guessing. Even as her character’s behaviour becomes ever more appalling, Foy still demands our sympathies because of the predicament she appears to be in.

It takes a brave actor to take the risk of being so horrible; perhaps it felt like a holiday after the strictures of The Crown. Whatever the reason, being a bad girl is a very good look on Foy.