Review: Unsane

Claire Foy is a troubled woman who relocates to escape a stalker. Somehow a meeting with a therapist ends with Foy unknowingly signing herself in for a long stay as a patient at an asylum. Before long Foy is claiming that a bearded orderly (Joshua Leonard) is her creepy stalker come to do her harm. Jay Pharaoh and Juno Temple play inmates, Amy Irving plays Foy’s helpless mother.

Out of the 42 directing credits listed on IMDb for Steven Soderbergh (“Erin Brockovich”, “Traffic”), I’ve only seen 14 so far, and out of those 14 I probably only like his debut “sex, lies, and videotape”, “Traffic”, and maybe “The Limey” and his Liberace biopic “Behind the Candelabra”. Otherwise I think he’s the most overrated filmmaker still frequently working today. Your mileage may and likely will wildly differ, as the man is extremely popular with both audiences and critics. I’m aware it’s just me. Even his forays into genre filmmaking thus far haven’t thrilled me, including the popular capers “Ocean’s Eleven” (and its even worse sequels) and “Out of Sight”. I thought they were both a bit bloated and dull. Now here he is directing this 2018 psychological horror film on an iPhone 7 Plus. On the positive end, it doesn’t look a whole lot worse than most films shot these days for being shot on a mobile phone (I’m still a celluloid purist in case I haven’t told you already this week). On the downside it sucks, and although I can’t blame it on the iPhone, it still looks ugly and bland.

Scripted by Jonathan Bernstein & James Greer (writers of the Jackie Chan movie “The Spy Next Door”, of all things), it offers up nothing you haven’t seen done better a million times before and Claire Foy gives a gratingly overwrought performance lacking in any sympathy for her character whatsoever. I get the feeling that the intention here is to keep the audience on edge and somewhat aggravated/unnerved, but to be honest I was bored and the film is stupidly overdone. Everything about this mental facility is horribly overdone, showing that Soderbergh just isn’t a good fit for horror. He’s probably partly to blame for Foy’s misjudged performance, allowing her to start at 11 and keep going. The histrionics also extend to Juno Temple’s ridiculous turn as the ‘look at me, I’m playing a crazy person- Gimme an Oscar!’ fellow mental patient. She’s basically a poor person’s Angelina Jolie in “Girl, Interrupted”, and Angelina didn’t really deserve the Oscar either, did she? However, former “SNL” guy Jay Pharaoh and especially “Blair Witch Project” actor Joshua Leonard are quite fine in their roles. It’s particularly nice to see Leonard continuing to get character work, here playing a creep who may or may not actually be a creep after all. Other than those two, I just didn’t believe a single thing here, and no matter how fantastical a subject matter may be, you’ve at least got to get me to buy into it for the duration of the film. This scenario isn’t even, on paper, the most fantastical thing at all. In fact, I’d recently watched a documentary on people being involuntarily sent to mental/aged care facilities or being duped into signing themselves into one as part of an insurance scam. However, that portion of the story is barely touched on, and the rest is a lame psychological horror pic that you’ve seen done a million times since the 1940s.

An irritatingly mannered Claire Foy, an ill-suited Steven Soderbergh, and a completely uninspired and clichéd script leads to 90 minutes of tedium. Nothing much to see here.

Rating: D