ABCs of Horror 3: “U” Is for Unsane (2018)
Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?
When it comes to the career-minded young woman, especially within the one-step-removed realm of realism that is this hypothetical woman as the protagonist of a major motion picture, it should be immediately clear to any of us why that person would hesitate in asking for any form of mental or emotional support. Even when desperately and clearly needed, asking for help signals–or one fears it will signal–the sort of “weakness” or fragility that is unfairly correlated with a lack of competence in the world of business, or even a lack of fitness to merely exist as an independent wife, mother or individual. Women rightfully fear being minimized and marginalized should they dare voice any of their problems, disbelieved or scapegoated even when they bring their problems to professionals who are supposed to be trustworthy. And even when “help” is proffered, too often it’s not the help that is actually needed. These are the fears at the root of Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, a nasty little piece of psychological quasi-exploitation, a film of memorably odd contrasts that balances a potentially problematic depiction of mental health professionals with scintillating performances and an alienating visual language. Every bit of it leaves the viewer feeling unbalanced and queasy.
Sawyer (Claire Foy) is an anxious but curtly competent office drone, attempting to settle into an unfamiliar new city and job after leaving Boston following a protracted series of incidents involving an obsessed stalker named David. Though technically independent, her life is ruled by the overwhelming anxiety that this man, who made her life hell for several years despite attempted police and court-ordered intercessions, will suddenly reappear. Stubbornly, she attempts to soldier on while keeping everything to herself in tight-lipped professionalism, without building any true support system–her mother is unaware of the stalker or why she truly left home, and she holds everyone else at a distance, from coworkers and her leering boss, to the random men she meets online for dispassionate hookups (aborted due to panic attack in the film’s opening minutes). Finally, reeling from her physical reaction to any attempt at intimacy, she looks up a local therapist and books an appointment. And boy, does she choose the wrong place.
After a few cursory questions about suicidal ideation, the therapist Sawyer visits asks her to sign a few “standard boilerplate” forms, and our protagonist finds that she has apparently signed away every one of her rights and submitted to 24 hours of quarantined observation at the mental health facility, quickly extended to 7 days after the stay is approved by her insurance, despite her protestations. Turns out, the place is some sort of for-profit scam specifically built around more or less abducting people and holding them as patients until the insurance money runs out, as another patient/inmate helpfully explains. Oh, and this is about when the aforementioned stalker David (Joshua Leonard) reappears, now in the guise of a hospital orderly with direct power over Sawyer. So yeah, the lady is a bit justifiably stressed, is what we’re getting at.
This borderline ludicrous plotting pushes Unsane firmly in the direction of B movie exploitation, using American fears of mental health assessment to evoke something not terribly far from the Jack Hill-style women-in-prison genre, with all the mental and physical threat that entails. Arguably, it’s a borderline irresponsible depiction of mental health treatment or therapy by Soderbergh, who I’m assuming does not actually believe that a woman is likely to be tricked into signing commitment papers during her introductory appointment. A more plausible scenario for Sawyer’s commitment would be appreciated, given that the real-world impact of people seeing these sequences of Unsane could be disincentivization of an unwell person actually seeking mental health treatment because they’re worried of being stripped of their rights in exactly this sort of way. Soderbergh and screenwriters Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer largely abdicate that responsibility, more interested in the tension and paranoia of the story.
And indeed, Unsane is plenty effective as a thriller and eventually as a legitimate psychological horror drama, thanks to the measured rage and resourcefulness of Foy and the insidious but pathetic manipulations of Leonard. The natural inclination of this type of story is for the audience to dive into the psychological implications of the David character, to at least consider the possibility that this is all in Sawyer’s head and that he isn’t actually present at the facility, but Unsane makes it clear and concrete relatively quickly that what its protagonist is experiencing is all too real. David’s drive to hound and control Sawyer’s every waking breath extends to megalomaniacal degrees, and given this orderly’s (deeply unrealistic) ability to seemingly get away with doing literally anything to patients without anyone noticing, there’s only one recourse for Sawyer: Understand the pathology that makes him tick, and turn it around on him. That she does, in a series of intense, needling confrontations that feel like they’re being staged as a black box theater melodrama, the hushed audience a few feet out of view.
This mounting battle of wills and neuroses is enhanced by a technical aspect of Unsane that would likely have been in the opening paragraph of any review written on the film back in 2018: Soderbergh (serving as cinematographer as well) shot the entirety of it on an iPhone, specifically an iPhone 7 Plus. This is exactly the sort of of-the-moment exploration of technology that is an obvious novelty and hook at the moment of release, but then natural to question as a gambit six years and eight iPhone generations later. What does the phone shooting technique actually bring in terms of substance and style? Well, it does add a not-so-subtle layer of disconcerting artifice to almost every image, a willful revocation of lusher “cinematic” aesthetics. Contrasts abound. There’s a lot of deep focus, but simultaneous fisheye effect and oddly high and low camera angles that often make it feel like we’re looking at Sawyer through a peephole or voyeuristic secret vantage point, making for a visual field that is often simultaneously cramped and deep. It’s a suffocating style that ramps up the inhospitality of the protagonist’s fluorescent-drenched office, but especially the seemingly endless series of low-lit corridors and rooms in the mental institution. Soderbergh wanted an oppressive prison, and he got one.
Despite its pulpy genre leanings, though, the most effectively anger-inducing moments of Unsane are the more understated ones that genuinely tap into the experience of women living in the shadow of male aggression, and the insulting advice that society foists on them in the hopes that they might avoid it. Matt Damon, in an out-of-nowhere cameo as a home security expert, appears in a flashback where Sawyer is given a sprawling, itemized list of all the changes she should make in order to be more safe from the stalker who may or may not still be after her–delete your social media, don’t use your garage, change all your home security, change your daily routines–as Foy looks on with a steadily mounting indignation as she realizes how thoroughly she’s being told to transform her life. Not present: Any plan to stop the tormentor, to change his actions or behaviors. Instead it’s the victim whose job it becomes to somehow minimize the damage.
At the same time, Foy does a lovely, nuanced job of communicating that Sawyer’s biggest weakness is not that she’s been victimized, but that she’s typically unwilling to turn her perception on herself in the wake of her trauma. She refuses to admit to herself that she does indeed, more likely than not, suffer from some kind of mental illness–not the kind that will be helped in any way by being involuntarily committed to this institution, but it is there. Sawyer deserves help, but she’s understandably so focused on fighting against the injustice of what is happening to her that she can’t recognize that she needs that help in the first place. Soderbergh’s epilogue thankfully doesn’t abandon this thread, downplaying any sense of “empowerment” in having escaped her predicament with the certainty that Sawyer is still by most any measure a ticking time bomb.
Unsane can and will be viewed multiple ways, by disparate audiences: As low-budget B movie potboiler, visual experiment in unconventional cinematography, or vicious critique of gendered power dynamics. Which reading would mean the most to Soderbergh isn’t exactly clear, but they’re all valid in their own way. Maybe a few years from now, the director will revisit it with an iPhone 20, and we’ll find out just how much more poor Sawyer can endure.
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.