HAVING a stalker would drive anyone mad. Just how mad is the question raised in Steven Soderbergh’s variously ingenious, intense and over-egged psycho-thriller.
Far from the safe confines of Buckingham Palace, The Crown’s Claire Foy plays a young woman who is committed to a mental institution against her will. Once inside, she becomes convinced that one of the male nurses is her stalker of old. Or it is just the sort of traumatised delusion that led her to a shrink in the first place? Either way, she’s trapped in a bona fide nightmare.
A few years ago Soderbergh announced his early retirement from making movies. Thankfully he couldn’t stay away for long. And he hasn’t lost any of his knack for surprise. He’s followed last year’s comeback, the comic crime caper Logan Lucky, with something at the far darker end of the spectrum.
We first meet Sawyer Valentini (Foy) in stark close-up, which is the perfect mode of exploring a woman whose mind is a mess of emotions. A data analyst in a bank, she’s clearly professional, smart and on her way up the ladder; she’s also haughty, rude, nervy and paranoid. She appears to have lost the ability to be trusting or sincere.
There are reasons why she’s like this. The way in which Sawyer adeptly fends off the harassing overtures of her boss suggests that she’s been here before. And there is a drip-feed reveal of the extreme stalking that forced her to relocate from her home in Boston to Philadelphia, and an empty new life.
But it’s not working. She never feels safe. And so Sawyer meets with a therapist in a private clinic. It seems like a helpful chat and she decides to book another appointment. As is always the case, however, she really needs to pay attention when filling in a form.
Soderbergh and his writers ground their film in a mordantly believable reality, that private health institutions in the US would angle to lock people up whether they are ill or not, in the expectation of being paid by insurance companies. As Sawyer’s new confidante in the institute tells her, “they keep you in until the money stops.”
And once stripped of her freedom, and thrown into a room with some genuinely troubled individuals, it’s inevitable that this highly strung woman will give her captors every legitimate excuse to extend her stay. In her mouth, the mantra “You can see I don’t belong here” becomes more and more self-defeating.
Once she sees the blandly creepy face of her stalker (Joshua Leonard) doling out her meds, the film veers from the plausibly horrendous to outright horror. Is she delusional? Is he the real thing? And if he is, is he planning to court her or kill her? For a time, we don’t know any more than Sawyer does.
And the film works best when we don’t, and when the blend of social comment and genre horror is at its finest balance. Once Unsane reveals its hand, it starts to feel very routine and rather ridiculous.
The fact that Soderbergh has shot Unsane using iPhones is only relevant or interesting to a point. It’s been done to more visually arresting effect by Sean Baker in Tangerines. What it does achieve here is a certain strangeness, particularly when in fish-eye mode, or glued to Foy’s expressive features. The actress, who’s always had a scratchy disdain in her armoury, very smartly declines to make her victim-heroine easy to like, which leaves Sawyer’s predicament all the more compelling, even when the film itself starts to unravel.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here