Foy can’t save Soderbergh’s iphone chiller
Unsane 15 cert, 98 min
Dir Steven Soderbergh Starring
Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharaoh, Juno Temple, Amy Irving
On a good day, Steven Soderbergh’s oft-threatened retirement sounds like a royal waste, except that it’s not to be taken at all seriously. Unsane, the director’s scratchy doodle of a psychothriller, was shot on an iphone, and feels like the work of a man who can’t decide whether to retire or not. It’s rough, to say the least, and that’s not just the hasty visuals: the whole thing feels provisional and half-hearted.
The best case for the film’s existence is Claire Foy, whose performance as a captive inmate at a mental institution is impressively committed, in every sense. Following a regular day at her office job, the wackily named Sawyer Valentini is on a Tinder date that goes weird. She’s halfway to sex with some guy, then freaks out and locks herself in her bathroom, remembering a past stalker whose impact on her fragile psyche clearly isn’t over. The next day, she goes for an experimental therapy session and, before you know it, she’s under lock and key, having unwittingly signed away her freedom to a bunch of untrustworthy psychiatrists, one of whom, played under a non-reassuring beard by Joshua Leonard, may or may not be her erstwhile nemesis.
Doubting Foy’s sanity throughout is the name of the game, but the film’s script paints Soderbergh into a corner, because we scarcely think he’s likely, in this day and age, to make her the victim of a sex predator purely cooked up by her own imagination.
Soderbergh does get some good mileage out of the smartphone cinematography, because it’s the logical equipment for any fly-on-thewall these days, but it’s the characters who don’t add up, and the story scarcely seems bothered with half of them. Each new phase of the plot, including a rescue attempt from Amy Irving as Sawyer’s helpless mother, lands with a dull clomp, and the fate of more than one character is given away too early to keep enough doubt in play.