Unsane

Steven Soderbergh's clever, iPhone-filmed distress fest, Unsane, is a tightly wound creep thriller that will no doubt have audiences yelling at the screen -- in the best way. British actress Claire Foy (The Crown) stars as Sawyer Valentini, an anxious and possibly crazy young woman who is on the run in Pennsylvania from a stalker back home in Boston. A visit to a counselor for her anxiety lands her in a psychiatric hospital, that may or may not be legit, for observation, but she bounces off the walls and off of other patients. A gregarious fellow patient (Jay Pharoah of SNL) who may or may not have an opioid addiction befriends Sawyer and tries to help her adjust. A weirdly menacing medical technician played by Joshua Leonard (director and star of the pioneering handheld creep fest The Blair Witch Project) may or may not be Sawyer's stalker from Boston and no one seems to believe her claims that he is. Both Foy and Leonard deliver a degree of intensity in their roles that could have easily devolved into parody. Instead, they are riveting and exhausting. Unsane is a smartly crafted tale in this Age of Time's Up and predatory health care.