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“THINK of your cellphone as your enemy”, says Matt Damon during a brief cameo here.
Damon’s job is to help troubled office worker Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) stay one step ahead of a stalker in maverick director Steven Soderbergh’s latest effort.
And it’s good advice. Sawyer has had to quit her job and move hundreds of miles away from home.
One ill-judged tweet or lazily-framed Instagram post and the sinister David (Joshua Leonard) will creep back into her life.
But Soderbergh is clearly still on very good terms with his own mobile phone as he used it to shoot every scene of this deliciously pulpy and unusually grainy thriller.
It’s a gimmick but it mostly pays off. The iPhone’s tight frame and smudgy image don’t just add to Sawyer’s paranoia – they also put us in a very uncomfortable position.
Foy’s intense performance makes us feel Sawyer’s pain, but visually at least, we’re always on the side of the stalker. In a queasy early scene, we find ourselves lurking at the bar as Sawyer meets an internet date.
It goes awry shortly after we go back to her apartment. Sawyer can’t put her stalker behind her, so next day she sneaks out of her new office to make a flying visit to a therapist.
But when the psychiatrist tricks her into signing up for a week in a mental hospital, she begins to wonder whether her health insurance policy is just a little too generous.
Now the plot begins to twist and turn. The more loudly Sawyer protests, the more we begin to doubt her.
Then she discovers that her stalker has got a job as a nurse on her ward.
Is this another lunatic twist from the screenwriters, or a trick of Sawyer’s fevered mind?
Foy keeps the guessing game ticking over. After her turn in TV’s The Crown, the Golden Globe winner is enjoying her time off the leash.
Although with this one, you might feel slightly grubby for being so right royally entertained.
THIS Disney adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 children’s book was praised for its diversity as soon as it was announced.
Selma director Ava DuVernay would be in charge, mixed-race kid Storm Reid had the lead role of Meg, and Oprah Winfrey was cast as a celestial superbeing.
Marvel had already announced its Black Panther movie, so it was seen as more evidence of a wave of inclusiveness sweeping the US.
Sadly, the casting is THE WEEK AFTER: Death Wish,