‘Unsane’: It’s Not Paranoia if Someone Is After You

Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, “Unsane,” is an effectively nasty, sometimes funny, sometimes grindingly unpleasant thriller about a woman who is involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. From one angle, it plays like an old-school exploitation flick, one of those damsel-in-distress freakouts in which an intrepid heroine faces down danger in a skin-baring top. This being Soderbergh, peril isn’t sloppily served up with flat line readings, jiggling breasts and lousy cinematography but delivered with slyness and jolts.

Sawyer — an excellent, febrile Claire Foy, best known for playing Queen Elizabeth II on the Netflix series “The Crown” — is a new arrival in a generic city. She doesn’t say much about herself, but Soderbergh, a fast, efficient worker, fills in Sawyer’s life with quick, grim strokes — a dire cubicle, nosy co-workers, a predatory boss — and then he lets her out to play. This proves bleaker still. She hooks up with a stranger but when they end up in her apartment she flees to her bathroom. The prescription pills in her cabinet suggest there’s a reason she has fled, and a dark back story emerges piecemeal.

Sawyer goes to a hospital to speak with a counselor, revealing that she was a victim of stalking before relocating. This earnest confession leads to her being locked up — ostensibly because she’s a suicide risk — at first for 24 hours. Bad choices and violent encounters extend her stay, which grows progressively more frightening. The chick in the next bed, Violet (Juno Temple, persuasively feral), keeps harassing Sawyer, though Sawyer is given a friendly welcome by another inmate, Nate (a sympathetic, egregiously badly lighted Jay Pharoah). Then one day while lining up for her meds, Sawyer meets David (a terrific, utterly creepy Joshua Leonard), whom she claims is her stalker.

Written by James Greer and Jonathan Bernstein, the movie plays out as an extended game of cat-and-mouse. Despite some teasing it’s obvious who’s who and what’s what; but if the story holds next to no surprises, it does unload some brutally ugly shocks. Mostly, Sawyer insists that she doesn’t belong in the hospital but doesn’t help her case — she makes one mistake and then another, and consistently refuses to play the good girl — which prolongs her incarceration and torment. It’s easy to get how rotten she feels, especially given that Soderbergh keeps pushing his camera into Foy’s face.

Soderbergh shot “Unsane” primarily on iPhones using additional lenses, including a fish-eye. (He shot it using the name Peter Andrews, which are his father’s first two names; he also edited it, borrowing his mother’s maiden name, Mary Ann Bernard.) Big budget or on the cheap, like here, he is a great shooter and he plays with perspective inventively, distorting the edges of the image so they bulge out, a warping that dovetails with Sawyer’s disturbed, disturbing world. At times, the distortion skews bluntly comic as when, after she’s committed, Sawyer sits at a table partly obscured by an absurdly large coffee mug that looms in the frame like a threat (or a wee monolith).

Moments like this — and the presence of Amy Irving (“Carrie”) — suggest that Soderbergh had fun making “Unsane,” but too little pleasure has seeped into the rest of the movie. He fills the frame with tension and meaning, showcasing a madhouse of blue-and-white chinoiserie and a deep-blue forest that foreshadows a padded cell. But the palette is often as dingy as the sets, which fits the story but is hard on the eyes. What seduces are the hypnotic images of Sawyer walking the hospital halls as if she were in a loop or retracing Shelley Duvall’s footsteps in “The Shining,” another film that meaningfully uses wide-angle lenses in constricted spaces.

Soderbergh’s quick-and-dirty approach works here better as a conceptual gambit than as an entertainment. What keeps you watching even as the story becomes more off-putting are the actors and Soderbergh’s filmmaking. It helps, too, if you ignore the woman-in-peril clichés and sadism and just read “Unsane” as a self-aware riff on the relationship between critics and creators. It’s worth noting that the very first thing in the movie is the sound of crickets. The insect whirring would make an appropriate soundtrack for a country scene, but the glass and concrete crowding our heroine place us in a city. “Crickets” is slang for critics, but maybe the movie’s paranoid vibe is just contagious.

Whatever the case, these point-of-view shots of Sawyer, which shift while framing her through foliage, suggest that she is being spied on by a Peeping Tom. (That women’s paranoia is often justified, including in movies, dilutes some of the suspense.) Later, when David earnestly tells Sawyer that he has always loved her, or at least the woman he has fetishized, he sounds like a demented fan, voicing whiny disappointment about betrayal. Sawyer rightly, harshly, puts him in his place. Yet needy, nutty David doesn’t understand. He wants what he wants. And, as he continues hammering Sawyer for not living up to his expectations it is a reminder that why, yes, everyone really is a critic.

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