Unsane

Stephen Soderbergh shot this intense, polished thriller in just 10 days on a budget of only $1.2million — entirely on an iPhone camera. That becomes a matter of theme as well as medium.

  The speed of production results in a breakneck narrative pace. Heroine Sawyer is swept out of her normal life into an imprisonment and abuse she can’t stop or resist. Her plunge plays against the security of her desk job — appraising commercial loan applications for a bank. The plot unreels in scenes of high tension and explosions.

Her career in fiscal analysis is undermined by that assault on her sanity. The title is telling. This is not about the insane — the state of madness — but about the absence of sanity. The neutral state, the unsane, doesn’t necessarily denote the presence of a madness, the insane.

The iPhone also gives each shot an immediacy and closeness. Whether in the streets, in the woods, in the ward, or in a car trunk, Sawyer is right here — which means we’re right there with her. The medium is the agent and the emblem of her vulnerability.

We eventually realize our tracking shots of her put us in the perspective of the stalker she (possibly irrationally) suspects of following her. We’re on her line.

Sawyer learns of her friend Hoffman’s torture and death when Strine leaves the shot on a cellphone under her pillow — along with her mother’s wedding ring. Killing his rival and his target’s mother advances his plan to run off with her. 

It’s also a film of voices, intimating secrets whether of passion or of dread. Close voices, like you get on a cell phone. The film opens on the obsessive Strine’s voice, heard in the forest where he will later trap Sawyer. As with the intimacy of the tracking shots that put us into his position, he recalls the blue she wore when he first saw and fell in love with her. 

In their confrontation in her solitary cell, Sawyer undermines Strine’s power by voicing his secrets, then demanding he bring down and rape the inmate whom Sawyer knows to have a concealed knife. 

The iPhone medium lends weight to these scenes of voices. Significantly, Sawyer’s mother complains that Sawyer has not engaged in close conversation since her father died. At work a colleague suggests a voice of honey might work better than one of vinegar. That works for her against Strine in the solitary cell. 

In the last scene Sawyer is again taken over by a voice in her head, which draws her close to killing an innocent man she takes to be the dispatched Strine.

When Sawyer meets a one-night stand she makes him promise never to try to see her again. But that precaution doesn’t suffice. Out of fear of being stalked, she recoils even from him. 

She moved to the city to escape a stalker, but even at the end she’s haunted by the sense she is someone’s prey. A brief scene with her predatory boss supports that sense on a more realistic plane. Being paranoid doesn’t mean one is not being threatened. Here Sawyer is actually someone’s prey — despite the fact she has a neurotic sense of that. And she may be unsane but not insane.

Revealing Hoffman to have been an investigating journalist evokes Samuel Fuller’s classic, equally efficient B thriller Shock Corridor. There too the main character, an investigative reporter, is maddened by the world he entered to expose but that now won’t release him. This time the facility allowed by the new tech enables a fast addition to the Me Too movement, revealing a woman living a paranoid anxiety that's actually rooted in her society.
     Always a dab hand at genre films, here Soderbergh proves the Hitchcock genius of turning the latest technological advance to thematic purpose.