Like some out of hell spawn of Psycho and The Snake Pit, Steven Soderbergh’s UNSANE taps into personal paranoia, corporate conspiracy theory and the insidious stalker scenario.
Most of us would have experienced a moment of doubting our own sanity – something simple, non consequential and thankfully fleeting. Soderbergh takes up this empathy and ratchets it to searing suspense.
Scarred from the trauma of being stalked by the carer of her stricken father, Sawyer Valentini has relocated to another city. However, she is plagued by thoughts of still being stalked, catching glimpses of a man who resembles the predator.
Rationally, she consults a therapist to talk through her fears and imaginings. When she admits to suicidal thoughts, the therapist coerces her to sign in for voluntary observation at the Highland Creek Behavioural Centre, a place that immediately feels like brutal incarceration rather than caring therapy.
There’s nothing to make you nuts more than being thought of as a nut.
Oh, yes there is. When you find out that a facility staffer is the stalker that brought you this place. Stuck with your stalker and no escape. But is it real or is it a product of her delusion? It’s enough to make you unsane.
Soderbergh manipulates UNSANE into a white knuckle, red blooded, black deeded ride, keeping the identity of the real monster in this horror story at bay for as long as possible. And even then, is it real or imagined?
Audiences question Sawyer’s sanity as she grapples with it herself, a performance of powerful intensity by Claire Foy. Battling the demons of self doubt she goes through an extreme exercise of excruciating exorcism.
UNSANE is an intelligent horror movie with pertinent thematic threads – the bureaucracy of the health system, the condescension of women by men, the individual going up against the institutional.
Written by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, UNSANE was shot on an Iphone, but there is nothing about the production – direction, writing, design or performance – that is “phoned in”.
