‘Unsane’: Insanely terrifying—and groundbreaking

Claire Foy (left) and Jay Pharoah in “Unsane”

Imagine getting stuck in a mental asylum with the deranged stalker you’ve been evading for two years. That in a nutshell is what beleaguered protagonist Sawyer Valentini, portrayed to edgy perfection by Claire Foy, has to endure in Steven Soderbergh’s first horror film, “Unsane.”

If the sinister mood and misleading niceties of “Get Out” has made your hair stand on end, Soderbergh’s insanely terrifying and urgently paced psychological thriller has the same disturbing effect—and, maybe more, if you have an aversion to confined spaces and emotionally “volatile” roommates.

When her honesty is misconstrued as a sign of mental disability, Sawyer inadvertently gets herself confined to the behavioral facility against her will. It doesn’t take long for the troubled career woman to begin questioning her own sanity. Is she really just imagining her fears and predicament, as the experts “managing” her situation vehemently and snidely suggest?

Foy commands attention even without a crown or a British accent.

Bad to worse

Sawyer’s forced confinement quickly goes from bad to worse when she realizes that David Strine (Joshua Leonard), the creepy guy she’s been avoiding, has managed to get himself employed as a hospital orderly!

Sawyer can’t rely on the police to help her out of the tight fix she’s in because they think she’s merely going through another one of her “delusional” fits. Worse, her mom (Amy Irving), the only person who can vouch for her sanity, has gone missing!

Foy commands attention even without a crown or a British accent. But, there’s more to “Unsane” than just the actress’ transfixing presence.

The taut thriller isn’t just noteworthy for its ability to give viewers the heebie-jeebies. It is doubly significant because Soderbergh has once again veered away from conventional filmmaking norms by using a different platform—and a “more accessible” medium—to tell his crisply photographed tale: He shot the entire medical thriller using an iPhone 7 Plus!

As Variety very aptly noted, there are other films that have effectively utilized the iPhone as their directors’ medium of choice: Sean Baker’s “Tangerine” (iPhone 5s), Matthew A. Cherry’s “9 Rides” (iPhone 6s), Chan-wook Park and Chan-kyong Park’s “Night Fishing” (iPhone 4), Ricky Fosheim’s “Uneasy Lies the Mind” (iPhone 5), and Malik Bendjelloul’s acclaimed documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” (an iPhone app called 8mm Vintage Camera), which won the best documentary Oscar in 2013! How’s that for technology?