Review – Steven Soderbergh’s iPhone-shot thriller Unsane is a failed experiment

Steven Soderbergh was supposed to be done. The acclaimed director of the Ocean’s Eleven series had signaled his retirement from feature films with 2013’s Side Effects, before returning to the fold last year with the redneck crime caper Logan Lucky. A year later, Soderbergh has returned with Unsane, a grimy iPhone-shot thriller that harkens back to the low-budget horror boom of the 70’s.

Sawyer Valentini (The Crown‘s Claire Foy) is an over-worked young professional who has recently moved to a new city for work. While dealing with her creepy new boss, she spends her free time catching up with her Mother on FaceTime and searching for no-strings-attached hookups online. Her fear of intimacy is not exactly by choice — she is still dealing with the trauma of a stalker from her past, which she hopes to address in a meeting with a health professional.

Things then quickly spiral out of control — after signing what she assumes to be some fairly standard paperwork (always read those user agreements!) Sawyer is committed to an institution for observation. Her increasingly frantic attempts to escape are only seen as further proof of her instability, a Kafkaesque rabbit hole that imbues the first half of the film with an eerie tension as Sawyer is suddenly thrust into an incomprehensible world. That tension reaches its zenith when her stalker (Joshua Leonard) is revealed to be one of the staff members at the institution. Or is he?

The question of what is really happening with Sawyer keeps the audience second-guessing everything we see as her situation quickly spirals out of control. Is her stalker really working at the hospital? If he is, is it simply a coincidence? Or has someone been orchestrating all of this behind-the-scenes?

Eventually Soderbergh lays all the cards out on the table, and the film quickly gives up its central mystery and becomes a fairly standard thriller for its final act. The film’s tone is all over the place, with the early institution scenes resembling the ludicrous bureaucracy of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil before it devolves into a brutal slasher flick. Sawyer’s relationship with a fellow patient (Saturday Night Live‘s Jay Pharoah) provides some of the only moments of levity in the film, but even that relationship has an unnerving, intangible quality to it, and ultimately feels even less believable than the already over-the-top plot mechanisms Soderbergh runs us through.

Much has been made of the fact that Soderbergh shot Unsane on an iPhone, and that choice feels appropriate for the material. The film has a stark look, which has to be intentional — Sean Baker’s Tangerine was also shot entirely on an iPhone, and that film is as vibrant and bright as anything else at the multiplex. The choice may also have to do with the subject — Sawyer is a character who lives so much of her life via her phone, so what better way is there to capture that sense of claustrophobia and closeness than with the very same device most of us are so dependant upon?

Ultimately, Unsane feels like a failed experiment. The eerie first half of the film is a striking look at gaslighting and abuse that succeeds largely due to Claire Foy’s unhinged performance. That manic energy gets lost midway through the film when the wild tonal changes come into play, with the film veering from a satire on modern technology to a modern-day One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest before ultimately ending up as a fairly run-of-the-mill slasher.

With the amount of time and money it takes to bring a major feature film to the market, we will likely be seeing many more films shot quickly on iPhones and cheap cameras and distributed without the usual 12 months of pre-hype. There are definite marketing advantages as well — Unsane is a movie by one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors that almost no one knew existed before the trailers began popping up.

That ability to surprise audiences with something new and unexpected is likely what brought Soderbergh back into the fold. It’s just unfortunate that the unique release plan and adventurous shooting style weren’t in service of a better movie.