Movie Review: "Unsane", Filmed on an iPhone, Creeps into Your Mind and Your DMs

Thirty years ago, Steven Soderbergh emerged with feature directorial debut sex, lies, and videotape. In Unsane, he keeps the first two.

Shot on an iPhone 7 Plus, psychological thriller Unsane is just the latest cinematic experiment from the chameleonic, only occasionally retired auteur Steven Soderbergh.

In the past, he’s overexposed film stock close to the point of ruination, made celebrities do their own hair and make-up, hired acting amateurs and porn stars, adapted Channing Tatum’s stripping story for the big screen and even starred in a metaphorical version of his marital breakdown. (That one was called Schizopolis, which goes a way to explaining his new flick’s grammatical nightmare of a title.)

So, really, Unsane isn’t all that unusual for Soderbergh. In fact, it feels downright regular, carrying over some of his favourite themes, beginning with those aforementioned sex and lies.

As for the iPhone cinematography (operated by himself, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews): the most impressive thing about it is how quickly you forget about it. There’s some fish-eyed urgency to the close-ups, and the lighting of night sequences results in some digital artifacts, but honestly, those are quirks Soderbergh usually tries to replicate with traditional cameras anyway. After a while, you wonder if he just used his smartphone so he could simultaneously tweet about Atlanta.

Claire Foy (The Crown) plays the conspicuously named Sawyer Valentini, a woman who abandoned her old life in Boston to escape her stalker, David (Joshua Leonard). Her new life in Pennsylvania isn’t going much better, however. She sees David everywhere, and her nameless hook-ups, facilitated by dating apps, end in tears, with her pushing confused partners away in terror.

She visits a nearby hospital for a consultation with a therapist, only to find herself accidentally committed for a 24-hour stay. The 24-hour stay expands to a week when she lashes out at an orderly she mistook for David. And that weeklong stay begins to look indefinite when Sawyer insists it really is David tormenting her from inside the hospital, and not a psychotic misunderstanding.

Screenwriters Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer stretch credulity—for as long as humanly possible—to keep us guessing. Is Sawyer really seeing things? Is the hospital conspiring to keep her locked up as an insurance scam? And has David really orchestrated an elaborate, Ocean’s Twelve-esque plot to squeeze his way back into her life? Thankfully, Soderbergh trained this credulity-stretching muscle on Side Effects, which similarly doubled as a Vertigo pastiche/critique of American healthcare.

If you can’t get over this being shot on an iPhone, you may appreciate the disturbing metaphor of Sawyer’s trials being captured on her object of torment. In early scenes, Soderbergh leans into the behind-the-bushes approach, following Foy from afar. Later, we see text messages used to threaten and blackmail. A detective also advises her to delete Facebook to evade David’s gaze. Not since Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (about a murderous focus-puller who literally uses his tripod to kill) has the camera felt like an actual weapon, with us sitting on the incriminating side.

Unsane could be triggering for many women, yet it is remarkably single-minded in its feminist mission. Sawyer upends the sexist cliché of the "difficult woman", and Foy is blistering in the part, equally frustrated being told she’s mad as when she’s idealised as a polite, pliable girl. She has no sympathy for her lovesick stalker, nor should she, and 'friend zone' complainants should take note.

It’s a modern companion to the classic Gaslight, which inspired the term 'gaslighting' (a phrase that’s spiked in usage lately). Will Unsane inspire its own phrase? 'Unsaning', perhaps? Crazier things have happened. They’re making motion pictures on iPhones now, have you heard?

3.5/5

In Australian cinemas 25 April. Rated MA15+ for strong themes and violence.

Photo: Fox