I only have a few things to say about Unsane. I’m going to say them relatively quickly and then let you be on your way, because a) it’s what the ‘bergh would want me to do, and b) if I’m quick enough, you might be able to see it before it leaves theaters. Plus, I’ve been putting off writing this for fear of not having a Big Enough Point to make me look Truly Intellectual, and at the end of the day I believe it’s better to have blogged and bricked than never to have blogged at all.
The first thing you need to know about Unsane is that it has a perfect villain. David Strine is a very good stalker and a very bad person. He is a murderer, a con-man, very likely a sociopath and definitely a mega-doofus. He’s both the dorkiest person I’ve ever been afraid of and the most I’ve ever been afraid of a dork. Sawyer Valentini, our heroine and the victim of Strine’s unwavering love, has the unique pleasure of telling her stalker that he is a terrible buffoon. Earnest though the rebuke may be, it does not deter him in the least bit.
Strine is both a gnat too small to swat and a rock too heavy to move. He is untouchable because he is pathetic; he is terrifying because he is (surprisingly) adept at very many things. He turns Sawyer’s unfortunate overnight in a psych ward into a week-long stay in hell, and he does so with good intentions and a tender voice. He has turned Sawyer’s life upside down on several occasions, and is incapable of recognizing that this might be a bad thing. He is awful and he is wonderful. He is (ahem) Unsane.
The second thing you need to know about Unsane is that it was, as they say, shot on iPhone. This is important to the film because the film is exactly like the iPhone. At one point, Sawyer describes having a stalker as watching your life slip away. Hers is a life that she no longer owns — it belongs to the one who watches. Everything she does becomes something between a performance and a defense mechanism. She’s living an approximation of a life while she worries about being observed.
So of course Soderbergh filmed it with iPhones. He’s recording the process of someone losing control of their life with the same gadget that took control of our lives. If you’re going to interrogate intentions, privacy, trust, intimacy and truth while putting your hero under constant surveillance, you may as well put the cultural icon of the information age at the center of your production. The iPhone naturally parallels Strine’s POV — we watch Sawyer from behind foliage, while tucked away in a corner, from a block away, while chasing her down a hallway — and Strine naturally becomes a smiley stand-in for the benevolent tech companies that, gee, just want the best for us.
The iPhone is not a gimmick. It’s a metaphor for the tech that we all regularly crack jokes about being addicted to, subject to, tormented by. When tech founders speak of community, of sharing and of connectedness, doesn’t the optimism sound a bit like Strine’s when he speaks of the life he and Sawyer could have together? And isn’t Sawyer’s vacillation between rage and resignation at least a little relatable? There are two key differences between Sawyer’s stalker and ours: our phones don’t murder people, and Sawyer didn’t pay hundreds of dollars to keep Strine around.
The last thing you need to know about Unsane is that Matt Damon is a treasure.