UNSANE (15)
★★★ ★★
SEEING is deceiving in Steven Soderbergh’s hallucinogenic mind-trip for a traumatised data analyst, who sees the menacing face of a stalker everywhere she turns.
Scripted by Johan Bernstein and James Greer, Unsane is shot entirely on a smartphone and generates claustrophobia from the restricted screen framing.
Visuals are intentionally
murky, reflecting the gloom around our heroine.
Stockport-born actress Claire Foy (The Crown) plays Sawyer Valentini, who has moved from Boston to Pennsylvania to escape the barrage of text messages of a unstable admirer called David Strine (Joshua Leonard).
Always looking over her shoulder, Sawyer searches online for support groups for victims of stalking. She is directed to Highland Creek Behavioural Centre, where trained staff will diagnose the best course of action.
Filling in a series of forms to complete her treatment, Sawyer is shepherded into the depths of the facility, where she discovers that by hastily scrawling a signature she has commited herself.
Sawyer is forcibly relocated to a dormitory with other patients including nice guy Nate (Jay Pharoah) and live wire Violet (Juno Temple).
Sawyer is horrified to discover that another nurse bears a resemblance to David.
Once the script commits to revealing whether the terror is in Sawyer’s head, the tension swiftly dissipates.