Perhaps Feeling a Bit "Unsane"

Hi team,

I mentioned a few posts ago that, before I became a bit more strategic about the movies I've been watching, I would just kind of watch whatever stuff was in front of me.  It took a few rounds of this to realize I wasn't feeling super satisfied with my movie-watching time, and that I could instead be taking the ample opportunities available to me to watch movies that were more edifying, enriching, and worldly.

Well, one of the movies that made me realize it was time to change my haphazard approach was Steven Soderbergh's "Unsane" (2018).

Man I hated this movie.  I suppose I should have known better, since I've been irked by Soderbergh's willfully over-exaggerated vilification of psychiatry and mental health treatment before.  He makes some really problematic and frankly harmful cinema on these topics that express an outsized paranoia and hostility toward the field of mental health care.  On the other hand, when he steers clear of this topic, he also makes really wonderful movies!  Plus: Claire Foy!  So I rolled the dice with this one.

That gamble didn't pay off.  While this movie arguably makes gestures at addressing the terror of being stalked, it fails to meaningfully focus on that.  Instead, it grinds its axe against mental health institutions and psychiatric medication and manages to also throw in a bit of misogyny with an ending that makes Claire Foy's Sawyer seem like an unhinged and potentially dangerous wackadoo--like it's Sawyer who's drowning in problematic paranoia, not the film's creator.  While theoretically the film's ending could impress upon audiences how profoundly damaging it is to fear for one's life because of the violence of stalking, it instead accomplishes the opposite: it risks portraying Sawyer as just some nutty lady who hysterically over-interprets things and thinks she sees bogeymen around every corner (or at every restaurant), rather than a survivor of interpersonal violence, trauma, and some admittedly extremely poor psychiatric treatment.

Since watching "Unsane", I have happily moved on to watching generally much higher-quality movies.  That it helped move me in that direction is its only saving grace.

Shocking no one, I gave this movie a 1.

{Heart}