“Well, I had to follow you, though you did not want me to.
But that won’t stop my lovin’ you, I can’t stay away”
– The Bee Gees “Nights on Broadway”
Recently I’ve tried to limit my time on social media, especially Twitter. It’s a hellscape. Twitter is mostly just people screaming at the top of their lungs about whatever news story they’ve just read, and by the end of the day I feel less informed, and have a headache. I hate it. I still hop on Twitter every so often, and occasionally I’ll see women posting screen shots of direct messages they get from men. At first, I laugh. These are usually pretty pathetic come-on attempts like “your beautiful”, “your gorgous lol”, “I’m a gentleman and I want to treat you good and take you out on the town and do whatever you want to do”, or a dick picture.
Remember Chat Roulette? I’m sure it’s still around, but that was the joke with it. You’d keep hitting the chat button, or whatever, and like every third chatter would be some guy with his dick out. Twitter, Facebook, Chat Roulette, all this stuff was supposed to bring the world closer together, and give people a chance to interact with new people and cultures, and instead it’s just used for creeps to harass women, and whip their dicks out. Once I’m done giggling at these pathetic attempts, I realize that being a woman on social media is probably a never-ending nightmare!
I don’t get harassed online. I can’t imagine that headache on top of everything else going on in the world. Jumping on to social media is information overload. You get a news story, and then you get a million different opinions on that news story, and then you get a million think-pieces that are spun out of that news story, and then you get a million different fake news stories that you have to sift through. When you add on personal pressures of family, work, money, and your health on top of those things. Wooof. I can’t imagine having to deal with all that shit, and having some asshole send me a picture of his dick as well.
In UNSANE, Sawyer Valentini must deal with all that shit. Sawyer has recently moved to a new town in an attempt to get away from a man who was stalking her. The man, David, became obsessed with Sawyer after she spent time helping him cope with the illness, and subsequent death of his father, while working at hospice care. It’s understandably tough for Sawyer to move on. When we first meet Sawyer, she’s in the midst of picking up a man from the bar, only to be triggered when she takes him home by a vision of her stalker nearby. To help cope with this, Sawyer contacts a local behavioral center in hopes to find a counselor to talk to. During her first appointment with the counselor, Sawyer admits to having suicidal thoughts, which prompts the behavioral center to give her a release form (which she signs without reading the fine print) that places her under their care for the time being.
During her time at the behavioral center, Sawyer meets a fellow patient, Nate, who informs her that she is being kept there as part of an insurance scam by the center. The scam involves admitting people against their will, and then release them as their insurance runs out to cheat the insurance companies for profit. It’s also during her stay that she begins to see her stalker– now working at the behavioral center– dispensing medicine to patients under an assumed name.
UNSANE is the new movie from Steven Soderbergh. He shot it on an iPhone. This is the movie’s big selling point– or sticking point–for some. I’ll be honest, I noticed it at first, and then I didn’t notice it much after about the first five or six minutes. I’m also not sure this is going to start some wave of big movies being shot on iPhones. Steven Soderbergh is very talented. He’s good enough to pull off an iPhone movie, and I’m not sure if a lot of other directors could do this. Plus, I was surprised to find that I think it kind of works here. Part of the reason he shot UNSANE on an iPhone was to provide a sense of claustrophobia–like the walls are closing in– and the movie is pretty successful in conveying that. Not all of that is due to the iPhone shooting though.
There’s a scene near the end of UNSANE where a detective advises Sawyer on the steps she needs to take to avoid her stalker that sums up a lot of what UNSANE is about. The detective tells her to delete her Facebook, Instagram, and make sure nobody tags her in any posts on social media. The detective points to her cell phone and says, “this is your enemy”. It’s messed up, but it’s true. The walls are closing in on Sawyer, and social media plays a major role in that. Sawyer not only must avoid her stalker, but she must avoid social media, because social media makes it a lot easier stalk people. All because she was a decent person, and did her job while working at a hospice center. David is the type of guy who would DM Sawyer “I’m a gentleman and I want to treat you good and take you out on the town and do whatever you want to do”. The role social media plays in aiding a stalker is a 21st century problem, but it isn’t the only one on UNSANE’s mind.
I think this might be our second big recent “Health Care Horror” movie, with the other big one I can think of being SAW 6. UNSANE is a movie about how bureaucracy, red tape, money, and general incompetence clog up the systems that should be there to help people. Sawyer has gone through some shit, and she needs help, but because our system is so twisted, and money-driven, the behavioral center isn’t interested in providing that. The horror in UNSANE spins out of what happens when we stop treating people like living, breathing humans, and start treating them like numbers in a quota that needs to be hit.
The people that run these institutions are just that: people. They are part of a system that is inherently flawed, because every man-made system is just that: man-made. There’s a streak of bureaucratic incompetence that runs through UNSANE. The people in charge of the institution are driven by money, but they also have masters to answer to. Everybody: the police, the lawyers, the doctors, the patients, have to play by the same rules and regulations, and they are all at the mercy of the insurance companies. UNSANE doesn’t let Sawyer off the hook either. She’s the one who doesn’t read the contract that ends up committing her. But in a world where endless rules and regulations are dumped on a pieces of paper people don’t read. Would you do things differently? I’m not sure I would.
UNSANE is Steven Soderbergh dipping his toes in the horror genre, and using it to explore a variety of different 21st century issues. At the root of Sawyer’s issues is the obsessed man that is stalking her. But on top of that, it’s the pressures surrounding her. Is UNSANE about a woman trying to overcome the wounds of an assault? Is it about a woman cracking under the pressure of her responsibilities? Is it about her trying to recover from the loss of her father? Is it about the flaws in the American health care system? At the end of the day, UNSANE is about all of those things piling on top of each other.