While small budget films usually aren’t housed in the upper echelon of filmmaking history, they tend to have some endearing qualities…a kind of commiserative charm. After all, there’s an entire film sub-culture dedicated to producing B-movies. With more avenues to make movies than ever before, and with big studios regularly peddling junk, it’s really not surprising to see a resurgence in B-movies. For something with a reasonably large theatrical release (2,000+ theaters), Unsane certainly walks that line.
Right out of the gates, there was something off about this movie. I couldn’t quite place it, but after a little research, it’s because it was shot entirely on an iPhone. While it’s a cool idea and refreshing to see the extent of what can be done with just your smart-phone, it ultimately isn’t a benefit to the film. The subject matter necessitates it being odd, but it was lacking from a quality standpoint. The early establishing shots are filmed from afar, hidden behind bushes. It is ultimately a film about a stalker, so it’s not that it doesn’t fit, but it looked cheap and felt cliched. For a Steven Soderbergh directed film, the production quality was shockingly weak. This is his first venture into the horror genre and it’s obvious. The first 20-30 minutes felt like watching something on you’d find late night on Cinemax and only improved marginally from that point forward. He’s got a pretty respectable resume, but when talking about the best works of his career, I doubt this title will come up in conversation. Just last year he put out Logan Lucky which hit all the key notes you’d expect, and if nothing else, Soderbergh can say Unsane was nothing like his other films. His efforts here were intentionally low budget (I think) and succeeded in building an uncomfortable perspective from which to watch the film.
We follow Sawyer Valentini, played by Claire Foy, an account who’s looking to advance her career and keep her head down. Somehow, she both accidentally and voluntarily commits herself to a mental institution for observation and things get much worse from there. Her introduction paints her as a bit of a bitch, so she’s not a sympathetic character you can immediately latch onto. Once it’s established that she has some post traumatic stress disorder stemming from a stalker she ran away from, you’d expect her to be more likeable. Oddly enough, she spends a fair amount of time being extremely confrontational and generally acting like a crazy person. The problem with the character design is that she starts just south of crazy without much in the way of escalation, so it doesn’t feel like her behavior progresses naturally. Foy managed to deliver a pretty solid performance by the time the credits rolled, but the first third of the movie was shaky. She was most effective when acting like a mental patient, so once the setting shifted accordingly her performance got stronger as the film went along.
Fortunately we do get a standout performance from Jay Pharoah here. Most recognizable from Saturday Night Live and White Famous, this role isn’t banked on his comedic skills. He plays Nate, another patient at the “hospital” who’s undergoing a four-week opioid detox. While his sense of humor came in handy, it was his relative normalcy that stood out. As Sawyer’s sanity begins to come into question, Nate serves as a litmus test for her comparative sanity and something of a moral compass as well. Pharoah did a nice job balancing his performance as both a big brother figure and the resident “go-to guy” within the hospital. This probably isn’t going to be his breakout role, but he’s got a couple more projects in the pipeline and I suspect we’ll be seeing more of him over the next few years.
Someone we’ve seen quite a lot of over that past 20 years is Joshua Leonard. He first broke onto the scene with The Blair Witch Project back in 1999 and has continued to stay busy on the B-movie circuit ever since. Here he plays David Strine, Sawyer’s stalker and would-be lover if things went his way. His performance isn’t going to earn him any awards, but he is sufficiently eerie and his beard is disturbingly robust. When making B-movies there is going to be a ceiling for the acting performances and, in this case, they were about as good as they could be.
An added benefit to having Soderberg direct is that he’s got some famous pals. Matt Damon makes a small cameo as a Boston cop who specializes in working with victims of stalkers. It’s a very small role so I’m extrapolating a bit, but he helped lend some stability to an otherwise shaky foundation and gave the movie some much needed credibility. In another small role Juno Temple was good but underutilized as Violet, a fellow inmate at the hospital. She played crazy well and her rivalry with Sawyer has a palpable, fiery chemistry. She was mostly broad strokes, but Temple made the most of it and her’s will likely be one of the more lasting performances in the film.
The screenplay by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer has its moments, but they are few and far between. It’s as if the screenplay were composed in halves. In the first half, we are left to wonder whether or not Sawyer is actually insane or just imagining things. Once that is answered, the second half gets into how she handles it and what she decides to do about it. The reveal came much earlier in the plot sequence than I had anticipated, so the majority of the film actually takes place after the twist. It was an interesting approach to narrative structure, especially for this type of thriller. The script has two primary fear tracks, Sawyer’s fear of the stalker and the fear of losing her mind. While both fears are legitimate, it’s evident Bernstein and Greer couldn’t decided which was the more powerful narrative tool. Unfortunately, they muddle the singular strength of one another and the effectiveness of the story hits a downward slope that continues until the end.
It’s never a good sign when a movie feels long and even though the total runtime was only an hour and thirty-eight minutes, it felt like an eternity. Everytime the most natural, plausible end seemed in sight, it just kept going and then went on some more. There was certainly elements that could have been cut down, but the length of the film wasn’t the issue…it was the pacing. The intense and often creepy score helped with that in moments, but couldn’t overcome hurdles in the script. I couldn’t find anyone listed to give credit to, but the music was one of the stronger elements of the film.
While I wasn’t disappointed, much of that is because my expectations were relatively low. Even the title of the film lacked imagination and didn’t do much to inspire confidence, but I decided to give it a shot based on a recommendation. There are some things this movie did well and it would have benefited tremendously from some high caliber actors in the key roles. The concept is interesting and the low budget approach gave it some panache, but ultimately the lack of production quality limited the effectiveness of the final product. Even so, it has managed to gross over $10-million worldwide so far which I’m guessing is enough to recoup the production budget.
Recommendation: Save your money on this one and wait for it to hit Cinemax, where it will fit right in. Conceptually, there are some interesting things going on, but the execution leaves much to be desired. If you’ve really exhausted all your other options, it could be worth a bargain matinee in the afternoon, but it’s nothing special.
Grade: C-