Joshua Leonard Claire Foy Sarah Stiles Amy Irving Jay Pharoah Juno Temple Aimee Mullins
When I like Steven Soderbergh’s work, I really like it (Traffic; Sex, Lies, Videotape; Behind the Candelabra; Logan Lucky)
and mostly I like all his work.
However…Unsafe is so
far-fetched, with a script devoid of cleverness—just one horror after another—I
checked out early on.
We’re given a brief picture of Sawyer (Foy) as
a bank clerk cheekily defending her report to a client and told in voice-over
about her history of warding off a stalker. This has left her with some problems to work through, and
she goes to see a counselor. What
follows gives mental health care a bad name. I will allow that its institutions can be criticized, but I
seriously doubt any facility would incarcerate someone simply for saying they’d
thought about suicide (just about
everyone has, at some point in their life), even for the insurance money. At any rate, this is how the story goes
in Unsane (script by relatively
inexperienced Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer).
Sawyer is put in with (mostly) insane people,
one of which—Violet (Temple)—is particularly confronting and annoying; one of
which—Nate (Pharoah)—befriends her and is trustworthy. It takes time and turmoil before she
can contact her mother (Irving) who vows to move heaven and earth to get Sawyer
released. But the psychiatrist
(Gibson Frazier) and the administrator (Aimee Mullins) give “reasoned” excuses
as to why she must remain.
The problem is the script, which shows a cool,
thoughtful bank administrator that Sawyer is lose that cool and suddenly become
hysterical, attacking others physically.
Other inconsistencies in character show up later on both in Sawyer and
her mother, which I won’t spell out.
Another “trick” employed in horror movies, which these filmmakers have
used, is for someone you think is dead to suddenly reappear. The sudden shift in Sawyer’s
personality at the end was particularly off-putting. Oh, so she’s a b---- after all?
Claire Foy holds this story together with her
fine acting skills. I’m
particularly impressed with her American accent after seeing her in British
productions like television’s “The Crown” and “Wolf Hall.” Joshua Leonard as David Strine is
just the right amount of creepy, pulling off a professional veneer with
underlying psychopathology, and Juno Temple is lovably one of the truly
insane. Amy Irving and Aimee
Mullins likewise do a great job as their characters.
Unfortunately, I found this movie so offensive
in the aspersions cast on psychiatric hospitalization that it colored my
viewing. Although I know there are
valid criticisms of such facilities, I would hate to see unfounded fears about
them reinforced, which I think this film does.
Inconsistencies in characters and an
unimaginative plot with flaws dooms Unsane
(which is not even an accepted word).
