Unsane

****

Reviewed by: Angus Wolfe Murray

Unsane
"Despite credibility overload claustrophobia floods your lungs" | Photo: © Fingerprint Releasing/Bleecker Street

You don't have to be off your head to be locked up in a mental facility although it helps because if you think you are being treated like a lunatic it makes you mad because no one listens and no one believes you and the more you shout the worse it gets.

Take a chill pill, babe!

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Fighting the system only confirms their diagnosis that you are a danger to yourself and others. First step will be chemical, the second a padded cell. You cannot win. Logic has been mislaid on the journey and truth never stood a chance.

Sawyer's horror is all of these things and more. She has traveled thousands of miles from Boston to start over in this other place where being a stranger is being safe.

From what? From whom?

Her obsession closes all channels to sweetness and light. She might look like Reese Witherspoon on the day that Wild wrapped but her character has been torn to shreds by a stalker who threatens what remains of her free will. When she seeks psychiatric help, someone to talk to, someone with a degree in paranoia and victimhood, the result is unexpected. She finds herself incarcerated in a badly lit dormitory, inhabited by damaged outcasts.

The plot of Steven ("Hello, I'm back!") Soderbergh's movie has loose threads hanging from every twisty script devise. Sawyer discovers that a man who looks like her stalker is working in the building. How can this be? He was last on her case over there.

Exactly. Hanging threads.

Despite credibility overload claustrophobia floods your lungs and terror smells as raw as a fresh kill. Questions trip you up and explanations melt into the cobbled back streets as you run for your life. Or rather her life.

Claire Foy, the perfect Elizabeth in The Crown, the perfect wife in Breathe, is an embodiment of radical casting. As Sawyer she crushes the English rose underfoot and gives a performance that is closer to David Mamet than David Hare, edgy, pressured by panic, neurotic, the sinuous side of sensational.

Reviewed on: 23 Mar 2018
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Unsane packshot
A young woman is involuntarily committed to a mental institution where she is confronted by her greatest fear - but is it real or is it a product of her delusion?
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Read more Unsane reviews:

Amber Wilkinson ***

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Writer: Jonathan Bernstein, James Greer

Starring: Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Aimee Mullins

Year: 2018

Runtime: 98 minutes

BBFC: 15 - Age Restricted

Country: US


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