Review of Unsane (2018) by K Nife C — 23 Mar 2018

It is time for me to accept the fact that Steven Soderbergh and I are probably never going to be on the same wavelength. While I do have a special place in my heart for Magic Mike, Soderbergh's work over the past few years (and especially since emerging from "retirement") has left something to be desired. On paper, Logan Lucky should have been hilarious and fun, yet it was like watching the cast of Hee Haw restage The Great Muppet Caper. When I heard he had secretly filmed a horror film on iPhone 7s and edited it with a 15 dollar app, needless to say I had high hopes for a game changing take on film making. What I got was an ugly B-movie.

Yes, it is just ugly looking. The film is pallid and dim. Sure there are a few shots here and there that look like they're from an actual movie, but for as much as the director touts the oncoming wave of phone-made films, Unsane does nothing to suggest it as a viable alternative to a good old fashioned camera (in any aspect aside from cheapness). The shots are flat, head on, set at unflattering angles to the actors most of the time, and the tracking shots have a really amateurish jolting going on as if the stabilizer wasn't configured properly. If you would like to see the effective cinematic application of an iPhone, I will refer you to Sean Baker's Tangerine. It's a much better movie in every aspect and a fitting story for phones whereas here the medium seems like a non sequitur.

What the film does have going for it is a very pointed critique of the modern mental health care system. Inpatient facilities are, for the most part, pill mills that trap the psychologically vulnerable at the most desperate junctures in their lives, milk them for insurance money, and send them from the clinic with mind-numbing medication that is placebo at best and addictive at worst. These clinics are staffed by the overworked, the apathetic, and the unqualified. The rare person who would want to make a difference might not be able to withstand the physical and psychic duress, and the rest are just there for a paycheck. It's a racket, and once you've been labeled as crazy, any subsequent thought or deed is immediately suspect, if not irrelevant.

Claire Foy does a great job at portraying the instability of a victim of harassment placed in such a a facility against her will. Her character is the only one fully realized whereas many of the supporting characters performances were granted next to no leeway by the production value. The brief psychedelic minute of her trashing a room looking for crayons is one of the few exercises in style, and it looks great. Sadly, the rest of the film is a bit of a trudge to get through, and none of the twists are surprising enough to justify the wait. However, it is great to see her tear down her virgin man-child of an antagonist for being a naive "romantic" with no sense of respect for her personal and sexual agency. Much like the straw man chew-outs by Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, it's a monologue that a few select members of our society need to hear. But when you get down to it, it's a cheap looking murder flick and would barely outdo any recent Netflix original movies.