UNSANE

Unsane (2018)

Director: Steven Soderbergh.

Unsane tells the story of Sawyer Valentini who finds herself unwillingly locked up in a psychiatric hospital after an interview with a therapist. Sawyer talks to her therapist about her previous suicidal tendencies for being relentlessly stalked by a David Strine. Based on this and that she did not look at the forms she signed, she finds herself stripped of her clothes, phone and gets told, she voluntarily committed herself to the hospital.

Her fellow inmate, Nate, however reveals to her that her incarceration was part of an insurance scam run by the company. She is placed in a ward next to a seemingly violent woman who threatens to cut her. Trapped in an unwanted situation, Sawyer lashes out verbally & physically, leading the staff to drug her and strap her down. 

It is here in the hospital that she seemingly runs into her stalker who is a member of the staff called George. But we don't know if she's telling the truth or if it is just her paranoia getting the better of her. In one of the earlier scenes, we see her getting a panic attack while trying to be physically intimate with a date, so the state of her mental health is questionable. It is only later we learn that George is David when he enters Sawyer's mother's hotel room, pretending to be an electrician. 

One of the interesting themes that Soderbergh approached through this film is how little women are heard and controlled by men. The lawyer who talks over Sawyer's mother as tries to talk about a legal way to get Sawyer out, the doctor at the hospital who is too busy looking at his phone to listen to Sawyer, the hospital male staff who drag her down to her bed when Sawyer tries to show them a phone containing Nate's bloodied and tied up body, George/David drugging her. These scenes are a nod to the gender dynamics that exists in the real world.

The film was shot entirely on iPhone 7 plus, which lends the film a sort of boxed up look, kind of how Sawyer feels, isolated, locked. Without using jump scares and other cliche horror tropes, Soderbergh creates that sense of dread with the camera angles and the background score.