Steven Soderbergh directed Unsane, which stars The Crown’s Claire Foy, who plays a woman who is either mentally ill and/or being maligned as such, but to what end? There are so many movies that I want to see that I automatically get annoyed whenever Soderbergh makes a movie after he announced his retirement in 2013. Side note: I love Daniel Craig, but I still haven’t gotten around to seeing Logan Luckey.
Unsane is an ambitious work that tries to do too much, and by the denouement, the lack of familiarity with the genre or the real life phenomenon begins to strain the suspension of disbelief. It felt as if the people that wrote the script never experienced or spoke to someone who was committed to a mental institution or was stalked. It is frustrating because there are enough viscerally real elements to sustain interest, but too many imagined ones that took me out of the movie.
Unsane feels like a mashup of Side Effects and Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her, but from the patient’s perspective, which could have worked if it felt like it was from her perspective. The camerawork in this movie is amazing. It feels like a peephole perspective and induces claustrophobia and paranoia for the viewer, but it is not actually her perspective. The movie occasionally shows moments from hr point of view, but we are actually looking through the eyes of those who surveil her, officially or unofficially, which means that Soderbergh made a choice for us to relate to perpetrators and not relate to her.
Unsane thrives on the tension created by not believing her and relating her, while simultaneously critiquing it, which is my main problem with the film. I don’t mind ambiguity when it is well done, but
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Unsane actually depicts her as if she is erratic and violent, a threat to herself and others, then acts as if that assumption is unreasonable and biased. The first indication that is supposed to give her credibility is another patient, a man, saying that she isn’t. It is not until the middle of the movie that we get proof that she actually has a stalker, but before that, she did seem legitimately disturbed. I did enjoy the final scene, which concludes that society makes you crazy then won’t help you when you need it, but the journey to get there is problematic and feels like mansplaining how society does not and needs to listen to women.
Unsane wants to critique and conflate the medical profession with a stalker, but ultimately flails at the depiction of both and undermines his critique by overreaching. There is something resonant and powerful in that critique. I love the idea that the medical profession, which is designed to recognize and treat mental illness, fails to recognize it, covers up and rewards it when a man shows the signs, but disproportionately punishes a woman when she displays similar behavior.
I’m sure that I’m not the only woman who was completely transfixed by the survival stories of women such as Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus. I’m not saying that Soderbergh was trying to model his stalker after the men who harmed these women, but the denouement suggests that he is more than just a stalker, he is the kind of man who enjoys isolating and holding women captive. Soderbergh’s stalker isolates her in an inventive way, by literally killing her emotional support system, but he does not arrange for her to be committed. It is a happy accident that feels Rube Goldbergian in order for him to exploit the medical profession’s malfeasance in the film and further condemn the medical profession, but it is not in line with the profile of such stalkers.
For me, the entire movie fell apart during the extensive dialogue between the main character and her stalker in the basement. The stalker ends up being a virgin, inexperienced, easily manipulated by his target, which is never what these men are like. They are usually men who have been in a number of relationships with signs of physical and metal abuse of their partners, but they are likely to still have a girlfriend. The instant that they are able to get a woman alone, these perpetrators rape their captives. I know that the men who made this story were not consciously trying to distance themselves from the profile of a stalker/kidnapper, but their imagination succeeded in doing so. To accurately condemn society, men need to depict the similarities, not the differences, between aberrant men and socially acceptable ones in order to understand why society protects aberrant behavior that is clearly unacceptable until it reaches undeniably criminal levels. It will also teach men that society’s approval should not be equated with acceptable conduct.
The majority of the hospital scenes in Unsane did not work for me. I felt like the closest that the writers were to an insane asylum was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I am not an expert, but I’m fairly certain that patients’ beds are not set up in a warehouse style room, and even if they were, it would not be coed. Would drug addiction treatment patients be placed in the same area as mentally ill patients? The closest that the film got to depicting group therapy was in a scene when one of the patients, not a counselor, ran the meeting. I think that the most terrifying movie about medical malfeasance is Coma, and while the early admittance scenes had that feel before the main character started interacting with other patients, it is largely dissipated and seems more like negligence and ass covering than a conspiracy. I also have to confess that I’m annoyed that movies proliferate more images of mental health treatment as a scam that should be rejected instead of a beneficial experience so if a movie is going to pile on to the negative depictions, at least it should be well done. I just don’t believe that even if you had a contraband phone and revealed it, no one would look at it, especially if it is not locked, and it has a snuff film on it of a patient that is later found dead. Just, no.
Congratulations to Jay Pharoah for landing a role in Unsane and escaping the gravitational pull of comedy. Juno Temple scares the living shit out of me, which is a testament to what a good actor she is, but I felt like the writers were unclear of what to do with her character. At times, she seems to be genuinely disturbed, but other times, she seems like she is trying to help the main character stay under the radar. Just like I feel let down by the overall narrative treatment trajectory of the main character, I feel as if Temple’s characters had similar narrative flaws and ends up being not as effective as her performance. I feel like Matt Damon knows that we’re done with him so he is sneaking into movies that I watch unexpectedly because he knows that I’ll skip them if he is in the promotions (Thor: Ragnarok).
Unsane has a lot of strong elements, which makes the overall finished product so frustrating. I wish that the story had more drafts, or the ideas were separated into two separate movies. The two major elements fail to completely cohere into a terrifying whole, but the potential was there. A must see for fans of Soderbergh, but for people intrigued in one or both elements of the story, perhaps you should watch something else.