'UNSANE'-LY APT CINEMA

by Andy Nowicki

There is a scene in Unsane, Steven Soderbergh’s riveting new paranoid thriller, that will likely imprint itself on my memory until my dying day.

In it, Sawyer Valentini (Clair Foy), a harried, tormented young woman, visits a mental health facility to see a therapist, who offers a welcome sympathetic ear, or so it would seem.

Near the end of the session, the therapist softly inquires whether Sawyer has ever had suicidal thoughts. Comfortable in the presence of a “good listener,” Sawyer answers honestly in the affirmative. When further pressed as to the method of self-slaughter she would choose, Sawyer replies not only candidly, but in some detail. At this, the therapist appears clearly disturbed.

“That’s…pretty, uh, specific!” she remarks, brow darkly furrowed.  

Oblivious to the therapist’s “concerned” response, or its possible implications, Sawyer requests another session. Without answering, the therapist hands her some paperwork to fill out, assuring her that she needn’t pay too much attention to the fine print. Sawyer wasn’t inclined to do so anyway; who really bothers reading all the tediously copious legalese that accompanies signing or initialing on the dotted line? So she duly autographs the document in all of the requested places, little comprehending the consequences of her careless decision.

An officious front desk worker instructs her to take a seat, and a moment later a beefy orderly enters and asks her to follow him. Bewildered, Sawyer follows this command (all the while I, the viewer, was thinking, “Don’t go with him! Run for the door!”), and is led to a back room, where a portly Rached-like nurse meets her with an immediate and alarming command that she disrobe and don a hospital smock. When Sawyer asks what is going on, her question is treated with outright hostility. “Are you resisting?” the nurse pointedly inquires. “Because it would be better for you if you didn’t.”

Clair Foy as Sawyer Valentini in "Unsane"

Later, after it has become clear that she has been unceremoniously dumped into a psyche-ward for an indeterminate period of time, Sawyer discovers that she is the victim of an insurance scam. The paperwork she was tricked into signing gave the facility the authority to hold her for up to a week, until her insurance declined coverage, at which time she would be released. What’s worse, it seems that the man who stalked her relentlessly a couple of years ago has now taken a job at the very facility where she is now being held against her will, ostensibly because she is “a danger to herself and to others.”

Yet who will believe her, now that she’s been committed, and therefore presumed to be delusional? 

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Soderbergh once directed “Kafka,” which was loosely based on that author’s famous novel The Trial, and there is indeed something deeply Kafka-esque about Sawyer’s plight. She is immediately taken to be insane, or at the very least “un-sane,” and legally her captors “have the goods” on her, yet it is all clearly an atrocious travesty of justice. 

A lesser storyteller would have made Sawyer Valentini a sweet and obviously well-adjusted person, to highlight the horror of the situation, and it is a testament to Soderbergh and screenwriters Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer—as well as to Foy’s pitch-perfect performance-- that Sawyer is in fact a moody and snappish girl, who isn’t always easy to like.

Interestingly, this disinclination to “stack the deck” in Sawyer’s favor only causes us to find her ordeals more terrifyingly deplorable. Maybe she is at times a woman struggling feebly to retain her sanity like a doomed fish flopping pitifully on a boat deck in an ultimately futile effort to re-enter the depths of the ocean. 

If so, doesn’t she deserve all the more to be treated fairly and with respect? Does the psychological establishment not all the more have a responsibility to see that she be shielded from undue harm? And if Sawyer has actual pressing mental health issues that could be sorted out in therapy, does her counselor not betray her confidence even more grievously by essentially tricking her into institutionalizing herself after winning her trust?

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While lurid depictions of asylums and scathing critiques of mental health professionals aren’t terribly uncommon on page, stage, or screen, with Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest providing the template for the “looney bin” genre, Soderbergh’s Unsane depicts a corruption characterized not so much by sadism and cruelty as much as it is by greed masquerading as compassion.

The “Unsane” asylum is one presided over by poised bureaucrats who smile blandly and breezily speak of all the good work they are doing, while also dropping dark hints that any negative coverage of their work might just be “actionable.” Meanwhile their vetting process is so poor that even an unhinged psychopathic stalker can join their ranks, as an administer of medicine, no less! And of course all scandals, including murder, are kept strictly in-house.

Unsane is essentially two movies in one. It is an intense psychological thriller about the destructive nature of obsession, as well as an indictment of an industry which brazenly uses people as a means towards enriching itself, all under the guise of helping them. Interestingly, the film's thrills involving Sawyer's stalker aren’t quite as mordant as its observations about a heavily corrupt and malignant mental health industry stalking the vulnerable.

In fact, between the asylum-keepers and Sawyer’s stalker, one might ironically reflect that the stalker is a nobler soul. True, he may be a creepy, murderous loon, but least he cares for Sawyer and sincerely wants what he (quite deludedly) thinks is best for her. The same cannot be said for the doctors and administrators who willfully, remorselessly, and altogether undeludedly collude to keep her—and many others—in miserable enslavement, the better to generate profits.