Grade: B-
Prolific chameleon director Steven Soderbergh’s latest
feature, “Unsane” is a wild, ambitious and altogether delirious ride. Writers
Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer manage to pack a lot into a tight pulpy
genre movie mold while Soderbergh (acting as his own director of photography)
captures the mayhem with only an IPhone--alternating between gritty
“shot-on-the-fly” style coverage and more impressionistic, hypnotic horror
movie shots. “Unsane” is at once a disturbing, absurdist indictment of
institutional corruption and abuse and an unabashedly sleazy old school slasher
movie. It doesn’t entirely work but there’s rarely an anxiety free moment.
“Unsane” is at its most unsettling within the first thirty minutes.
Without disclosing too much plot, the action revolves around Sawyer Valentini,
(Claire Foy, assured and fiercely determined) a young woman trying to move on
from past trauma. She goes to a nearby mental hospital, only looking for
someone to talk to. However, the hospital won’t let her leave and through a
little coercion disguised as run-of-the-mill paper work, Sawyer is
involuntarily committed.
This sequence of events left me in a state of unshakable
anxiety. I felt trapped and powerless along with Sawyer. The film unfolds like
an absurd, deadpan nightmare. There’s a bland feel to the proceedings overall. The
actors who play the hospital employees give stilted, awkward performances. But
this banality is precisely what makes the film so scary and twisted. The
hospital is so mundane and the employees handle Sawyer’s questions and pleas
for freedom with such a cold professionalism, as if keeping people here involuntarily
is the norm.
Sawyer’s predicament is further complicated by the fact that
she’s a woman. In many ways “Unsane” is a horror movie very directly about the
violation of consent and the way reports of abuse are mishandled and belittled
by institutions that are supposed to care. Sawyer is manipulated and eventually
left powerless by the people who she went to for aid. Her inquires and protests
are met with a chilling, hostile indifference. They don’t listen to her. They
don’t want to listen. And at times Sawyer even starts to believe their
diagnosis and vague responses to her questions, which is absolutely terrifying.
In the context of the #MeToo movement, “Unsane” is unexpectedly timely.
Otherwise, “Unsane” unfolds like a mix of Samuel Fuller’s
angry, “in-your-face” mental hospital exposé “Shock Corridor” and a grindhouse
style horror movie. Someone from Sawyer’s past comes back to haunt her, taking
things down a deeply unpleasant and nasty path. While the film’s commentary on
institutional corruption (how capitalism infects and rots the field of medicine)
is convincingly rendered the grindhouse stuff gets tedious after a while.
The mechanics of the plot start to break down. In fact the
last fifteen minutes are chaotic and sometimes flat out incoherent. In the
moment it’s still viscerally involving (like the rest of the movie) but
afterwards you’ll find yourself trying to plug up a litany of plot holes. Additionally,
in a rushed attempt to bring everything to a neatly satisfying conclusion, (in
an old fashioned genre movie sort of way) the ending is underwhelming. The rest of “Unsane” is strong enough to warrant
an easy recommendation even if Soderbergh ultimately loses control of his
ambitious project.
