The news that Steven Soderbergh filmed Unsane in secret, on an iPhone, feels almost inevitable. The 55-year-old filmmaker has a history of experimenting with technology and messing with viewers’ expectations, and it only takes a few minutes of Unsane to understand why he chose to use the tiny lens of a smartphone to create this taut new thriller.
Soderbergh uses voyeuristic closeups to tell the tale of Sawyer, a lonely, driven young woman with an acidic streak played by The Crown’s Claire Foy. Every detail—Sawyer’s expressive eyes, her freckled skin, the strings of saliva that emerge between her lips in her most emotionally fraught moments—becomes unavoidable and unsettling this close, and so do Sawyer’s actions early on, which seem to indicate either trauma from sexual abuse or other deep-seated psychological issues. That Sawyer’s behavior and history are intertwined only makes her ordeal in Unsane that much harder to untangle.