Critics reviews

Two tales of imperiled womanhood, both unmistakably colored by their respective time periods. Looking for Mr. Goodbar traffics uneasily in the apparent risks exposed by women's sexual liberation, while Unsane features a potent one-two punch of toxic masculinity and the current horrors of the American healthcare system.

The warped depth of field, the blooms of light, the uncanny clarity of an HD close-up with little or no makeup—everything that seems "off" befits a smart, creepy little psycho-thriller with plenty of menacingly askew compositions of its own.

Paranoia and grief synthesized into cinema. Neo-exploitation-humanist-anti-capitalist insanity. Genre filmmaking reconfigured for the digital age.

Its quickness and cheapness, and its posture as a basic genre film, elevate it. By acknowledging Unsane as an experiment and as cinematic filler, by keeping it fleet and under a hundred minutes, Soderbergh found a way to enhance how low-key and professional he is. Even the end credits go by fast.

Soderbergh had said that he wouldn’t be making any more films, but this apparent exception to that pronouncement has the experimental pretext of being shot in 4K on an iPhone. It looks fine... That said there is a televisual feel that makes it feel more like a companion piece to Black Mirror episodes than to Soderbergh’s other films – not that there’s anything wrong with that.

In using a convention most common to horror filmmaking – the first-person camera, as per Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project before it – Soderbergh aligns corporate conspiracy with a woman’s nightmare of stalking by an ex.

Soderbergh loves the trickery of heists, as his Ocean’s series and last year’s Logan Lucky make clear, but in a story about mental imbalance and manipulation, such ruses turn him into the oppressor. Soderbergh’s gaslighting of his character and spectator may just be more questionable than De Palma’s pushing of the limits of plausibility for entertainment.

Unsane is the third Soderbergh film to indict the health-care industry. It’s more of a throwaway than Contagion (2011) or Side Effects (2013), but it has landed, perhaps unexpectedly, right in the middle of the gun-control debate and casts a complicating light on what seems like the commonsense demand that people who have been institutionalized for mental-health problems should not be allowed to buy firearms.

Soderbergh’s production phase ballyhoo isn’t, by itself, any more interesting than Robert Rodriguez’s run-and-gun schtick, but becomes so because, as in the case of Preminger, it accords to results, being happily at the service of a fiercely independent producer-director with an exciting film sense who is pushing a product superior to the big corporate concerns.

The formal playfulness may occasionally undermine Unsane’s narrative tension, but it keeps the movie engaging on a visual level.

The film is simply a pretext for a technical exercise: Soderbergh shot the film entirely on an iPhone. But “Unsane” is also one of his best movies, because for Soderbergh, a filmmaker with an obsessive devotion to technique and process, there’s nothing impersonal or distanced about that exercise; it’s the very spark of his artistic passion, and that passion is the energizing force of “Unsane.”

Another director . . . would home in on the ugliness of the harassment itself; Soderbergh, playing up the staging and editing to play hype man to Foy’s exceptionally perceptive performance, instead makes it a scene about Sawyer’s inner sense of calculation. . . . Is that too intellectual for a dumb B-movie? I don’t think so—I think it makes the movie more surprising at every beat.