Checked out the latest (hey I thought he retired) movie from Steven Soderberg… Unsane. This is one of this artsy fartsy director’s weird experimental genre pics… in this case, it’s his take on the old insane asylum movie. You know the one, “I’m tossed into an asylum… am I crazy or is everyone else? What is real? What is my psychosis?” It’s all been done before but Soderberg does these art house genre experiments and sometimes they work… and sometimes they don’t.
This one… kind of doesn’t. It’s not a bad movie but it begs for a purpose or reason to exist. I mean, there’s no movie that NEEDS to exist but this one just doesn’t do anything particularly original or even interesting. The mystery or question of Clair Foye’s sanity has an answer that isn’t particularly compelling. I’m not sure it was boring so much as predictable… and kind of an excuse to put two actors in a single shot dialog about sanity (or whatever).
Plus its an experiment in creating a movie using an iPhone. It’s entirely filmed on a phone which is the second half of the experiment. The funny thing is, I didn’t realize it was filmed on an iPhone until after I saw it. Instead, it just kind of looked like one of his (Soderberg’s) low-fi grainy films… this isn’t the first with this look, it’s just the first with this look filmed on a phone. So it was a non-issue to me.
So, yeah, here’s a movie about a person who may or may not be crazy in an insane asylum. If that kind of plot appeals, then this is a low effort version of that genre. Me? It was a forgettable film that I’ll forget in a few months.
Score: 72