31 Days of Horror Movies – #18 – Unsane FTW
Unsane is the tense story of a woman constantly in fear. Red State (2011) turned out not to be a horror movie, so I watched Unsane (2018) today, which turned out not to be a horror movie. Some websites like Thrillist have called it a horror movie anyway, but it doesn’t follow the standard horror formula. It actually doesn’t follow any typical formula actually, so there is that. It’s up to you to decide if this is a horror movie, or merely the next Steven Soderbergh thriller. It’s the story of a woman named Sawyer who accidentally signs some medical papers and has herself involuntarily committed to a mental institution, where her stalker finds her. Will there be blood?
Can this type of thing actually happen? I think the basis for this story are the reports that some health care facilities have held patients longer than necessary, and false diagnoses have grown out of control. The False Claims act has been changed several times over the years and has recovered billions for the US, so I’m guessing it’s big business to fudge a little here and there. I’ve also heard of the practice of a patient manipulating a doctor by telling them what they want to hear to get pills, and the doctor is happy to oblige given the insurance company kickbacks. If only the movie really dealt with this issue instead of diving into generic thriller territory, as in Fatal Attraction.
The first half of this movie is pure genius. The pace is good, the setting is good, and the realistic tone works very well to tell the story. Sawyer is a successful businesswoman and has a strange life, seemingly hiding things from her mother, moving from her hometown of Boston to avoid something. She has a scary date, where she runs away in fear because she’s suddenly thrown into a panic. We the audience perceive her as unstable, so when she’s admitted to the mental institution later on, you can’t tell if she’s really delusional or not. Then she starts accusing some male nurse of being her stalker, and she freaks out, because he’s come all the way from Boston to find her. It sounds like an unbelievable tale and it is, so that’s why we distrust her. Turns out, the guy really is her stalker from Boston, there is shady stuff going on at the hospital, and Sawyer was right about everything this whole time. How disappointing is that?
The movie is very well acted. Claire Foy is really believable as the schitzo aggressive Sawyer, and Joshua Leonard does well as the stalker, but he’s just there to be the villain, the asshole Sawyer has to fight later in the movie. He has this subtle stalker voice that makes him sound as creepy as Hannibal Lector, so most of his scenes are entertaining, but his character is generic. Because the second half is so straightforward, the story is a slog of faux-tension, and I was just waiting for something, anything to twist the story into new territory not already covered by B-Movies like The Crush (1993). Guess what that one’s about? I think it would have been better to keep Sawyer as untrustworthy for a while longer and maybe play the psychological game a little harder, throw in some David Lynch dreams or something, and cap it with a twist bringing the story back to the issue of hospital insurance fraud. Maybe the whole movie should have been about Sawyer fighting her delusions (and fears). At least it could have been entertaining, and not a typical thriller.
Overall, this movie is just average. It’s well acted and entertaining, but the ultra-serious beginning showed so much promise that the rest of the movie feels like a let down. Sawyer is captured by her stalker and wakes up in the trunk with a dead body at one point, but manages to tumble out and run into the woods, which I think I’ve seen a thousand times in other movies. I think even Misery does the stalking subject better. Unsane does capitalize on it though and delivers a claustrophobic effort which feels very tense, at least for an hour.
