Unsane

What’s in a shot? More specifically, what’s in the three opening shots of a film? Steven Soderbergh holds all filmmakers (himself especially) accountable for the first three shots they decide to open their movie with. Soderbergh calls it the three-shot rule. “After the first three shots, I know whether this person knows what they’re doing or they don’t,” Soderbergh told Film Comment last year. Soderbergh isn’t solely referencing shot composition. He’s talking about how the lighting, framing, placement, movement, and blocking of a film’s opening shots service the story we’re about to see. Or, if they service the story at all. 

Steven Soderbergh is no hypocrite. He holds himself to the same three-shot standard as he does other filmmakers. Evidence of this can be found in Soderbergh’s latest film, Unsane, which uses its opening shots to expertly tell us what kind of movie we’re stepping into. The shots are so subtle and story-driven, that I risk explaining them here in fear of revealing too much of the film’s plot.

Sawyer Valentini is a fully-realized character from her first moments in Unsane. She’s hyper-intelligent, wildly intuitive (the way she analyzes and subsequently dodges a potential #MeToo episode with her new boss is genius), a bit manic, and increasingly paranoid. Sawyer knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to ask for it. Whether that’s being curt with a customer at her new banking job, or quickly telling a Tinder date that she’s down to clown, Sawyer isn’t afraid to speak her mind.

The strength of the Sawyer character is three-fold. She is written intelligently by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, she’s edited by Soderbergh in a way that suggests we’re only seeing the exact amount of her that we need to see, and, most importantly, she is acted to frenzied perfection by Claire Foy. Sawyer is a hyperventilating fever dream of a performance, one that hits 11 and rarely backs down. I haven’t seen Foy act before (including her work as Queen Elizabeth II on The Crown), but given the level of conviction she brings to Sawyer, I’ll be seeking out her other work soon. 

Just imagine. Imagine if you moved to a new city and went to your first therapy session with a new shrink. During that session, you admit to having had suicidal thoughts in the past. You aren’t currently having them, but, yes, you’ve had a tough life, and thoughts of self-harm have entered your mind before. The therapist hears this, and quietly asks you to fill out some “boiler plate” forms. You don’t read every word, but you sign, initial, sign, and sign. Within seconds, you’re taken to a psychiatric ward of the hospital, and told that, because you signed a form admitting thoughts of self-harm, you will now be voluntarily committed to the ward for 24 hours. Essentially, you are stuck in the ward for one day, with no options of recourse.

Sawyer does not respond to this situation lightly. She rages and punches and screams. Because of her explosive behavior, the hospital deems that Sawyer is a danger to herself, and they commit her for an additional seven days. But why? What’s their angle? What does this hospital have to gain by having a seemingly sane woman occupy a bed for an insane person? The answer is painfully simple: money. As long as Sawyer’s insurance keeps footing the bill for her stay in the ward, then the hospital is going to find reasons to keep Sawyer there. As soon as her insurance stops, the hospital will quickly push Sawyer out. 

The insurance scheme aspect is half of what Unsane is about, and, frankly, I found it interesting enough to sustain the entire movie. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Sawyer trying to manage her way through this hospital’s bureaucratic bullshit. Playing fake-nice to the cold hospital staff, scheming in the corner for a plan of escape – I loved it all. But Unsane adds more.

Much of Sawyer’s life trauma stems from being aggressively stalked by a man in Boston some time ago. They met under innocent circumstances, and the man quickly became obsessed with her. She got a protective order against him, changed her phone number and email address (several times), and moved cities. But she still sees him. Her unresolved trauma occasionally causes her imagination to play tricks on her. She’ll “see” her stalker for a flash, then lose her shit. The kicker is, shortly into her forced stay in the psych ward, she discovers that her stalker now works in the ward itself. Or does he?

Is Sawyer actually insane and seeing her stalker’s face on a perfectly innocent orderly, or is Sawyer fully sane and her stalker has somehow tracked her down? I won’t disclose which theory rings out, but I will admit that I had a frantic blast putting Unsane together. This movie certainly won’t be for everyone (is any movie?), but it most certainly was for me, and I cherished its every moment of epic hysteria.

Steven Soderbergh is one of the most practical and economical filmmakers we have. He shot Unsane entirely on the iPhone 7 Plus, a decision that has dominated the publicity surrounding the film. Watching Unsane on a large movie screen, the technical limitations of the iPhone are clear. The main issue is focus. In film, we are so used to seeing an actor’s face in focus in the foreground, with the background beautifully out of focus. This makes the foreground pop, and thereby hold our attention. An iPhone video can’t manipulate focus that way, so most everything in Unsane is shot equally in focus. There are exceptions, such as when Foy is shot far in the distance (in focus), and small objects are placed directly in front of the phone lens, causing them to be blurry. But within scenes, an iPhone camera cannot pull focus from one object to another. The other notable issue us color. The iPhone camera is low contrast and low saturation, so everything in Unsane looks slightly muddled with a yellow/green/brownish haze. 

But does it matter? If the story is engrossing enough, does it matter if the visual quality of the image isn’t perfect? We now consume content on a variety of streaming services, and, depending on your internet speed and cell reception, that content doesn’t always look perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I adore traditional cinematography and get thrilled when an auteur announces they’ll be releasing their next movie on 70mm film. But it all comes down to story. Unsane kept me fully invested, and because of that, I never had a problem with the video quality. If you have issues with the visual look of Unsane, I’d assume you were bored by the story, so you started to look for other aspects of the film to pick apart. That’s Criticism 101. And fair enough.

I liked Unsane after watching it, and I loved it after writing about it. I marvel at Steven Soderbergh. The man has had my creative heart since George Clooney slammed his tie on the ground in freeze frame in the opening minutes of Out of Sight, and Soderbergh has had my emotional heart since Michael Douglas said, “We’re here to listen,” in the closing moments of Traffic. That’s 20 years of marveling at a God of cinema. Unsane is a damn fine thriller, and yet another example of Soderbergh pushing technical boundaries and exploring new ways to tell a story. Welcome to the machine. A-

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