Movies
[Review] Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Unsane’ Is a Failed Experiment
Unsane preys upon two fears of the modern age. One fear is our oppressive health care system. The other fear is a stalker, which is unfortunately relatable to many potential audience members. There are moments of Unsane that capture what those fears encompass, but too much of the film indulges in experimental filmmaking to let it scare you.
Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) sees a therapist to help deal with recurring fears she’s having after escaping a stalker. The therapist tricks her into signing papers to commit herself as a patient, and Sawyer’s erratic reactions only extend her stay.
I feel like I’ve seen this B movie before. One was called Committed and starred Scanners’ Jennifer O’Neill. A perfectly reasonable woman innocently seeks help from a corrupt institution that then doesn’t believe anything she’s saying because she’s a patient.
Unsane theorizes that there is a whole psychiatric industrial complex that manipulatively commits patients and keeps them there as long as their insurance companies will pay for treatment. I call bullshit on this. We all have health insurance and have to fight them just to cover legitimate, necessary procedures. I’m supposed to believe they’re going to pay for weeks of in-patient treatment as a psychiatric facility? Mine is fighting my doctor to get out of covering a generic that costs $14 for me to just pay out of pocket.
The film begins by making us think maybe Sawyer is compromised. She is seeing things that aren’t there and attacking staff as a reaction. But then they just drop the ambiguity and confirm yes, it’s a trick and she’s just got to survive and escape the evil hospital.
A major distraction is the technological experiment of Soderbergh’s latest. He filmed the whole movie on an iPhone 7 but it looks more like he shot it with GoPros. Every single shot has that weird fisheye angle. We all take videos with our iPhones and they look normal. What the hell lens did Soderbergh put on that thing to make it look worse?
Sawyer suspects one of the orderlies is her stalker, David Strine (Joshua Leonard). Again the film plays with ambiguity before just committing to yeah, her stalker got a job in the hospital. That does escalate her vulnerability. She already can’t trust the doctors and now her greatest threat has their ear. It’s just a lot to ask after Unsane is already putting forth this elaborate health insurance conspiracy theory.
The performances are good. Foy is ferocious at both her most unstable and her most manipulative. Leonard is frightening with his realistic portrayal of stalker behavior. Jay Pharoah plays an undercover reporter trying to expose the insurance game. He’s the only stability in there, but it might have been more interesting if we weren’t sure Sawyer could trust him.
There are aspects of Unsane that could be triggering to people with panic and anxiety conditions. The shakycam of Sawyer’s drug-fueled episodes is troubling on a visceral level, but the subtleties of the life you live when trying to avoid a stalker is even more disturbing. It stops just short of indicting society for punishing the woman for coping with the PTSD of a stalker.
The scariest thing to me is all the doctors and administration who recite scripted talking points to Sawyer. Our society does this and it’s intractable. Those scenes give the viewer the anxiety of being stuck somewhere with people who can’t be reasoned with, and makes us want to escape. Then it leans fully into creepy behavior, torture and murder.
There are plenty of reasons to fear our actual health care system and hospitals. Unsane concocts too much that distracts from legitimate fears. If you want to shoot on an iPhone, fine. Use better lenses, but get your script right. That shouldn’t matter whether you’re shooting on an iPhone or 70mm, just figure out your script first!
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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