Unsane (Steven Soderbergh, 2018)

Hot Ones is a show which pits celebrities against an array of increasingly hot sauces. With a Scoville measurement of 135,600, Da Bomb is the sauce which usually takes out even the toughest guests. But that has less to do with the hotness than the taste which Charlize Theron describes in her episode as "battery acid": "There's no flavor. That's just 'I want to fuck with you...' I like spice but...that's like somebody being an asshole. That's like a dick move right there...I just want to flip that bottle off. You just ruined this whole thing for me." Steven Soderbergh's Unsane is the movie equivalent of Da Bomb.

It boggles the mind trying to determine what on earth attracted Soderbergh to such a juvenile project. Perhaps the novelty of shooting the thing entirely on an iPhone 7 Plus quite o'er-crowed his spirit. In any event, he's ignored the bankruptcy of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer's screenplay. Unsane is a film of lies. It lies about stalking. It lies about mental health. It lies about involuntary commitment. It lies even about the very architecture of its own setting, a mental health facility which somehow houses a torture/death chamber that none of the employees know about. And while all films tell lies by their very nature, Unsane tells lies just to fuck with you, i.e., it consists of nothing more than a string of empty methods to generate horror. It's a dick move, a film that could ruin your whole evening. You just want to flip off Soderbergh, Bernstein, and Greer. Unsane is so bad, in fact, that I may up Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997*) to a D-minus since at least Haneke is honest about wanting to fuck with you.

Some critics have twisted themselves into a wiener package claiming that Unsane is an exercise in pure cinema or that it evinces Soderbergh's adeptness at making genre movies, both tactics providing an escape valve for a film's godawfulness. For instance, in his New Yorker review, Richard Brody praises the thin characterization of the protagonist Sawyer (Claire Foy): "Soderbergh approaches Sawyer merely as a collection of traits that embody the idea of a victim of stalking; she is a character composed solely of pieces that fit the needs of the story." But that's how all mainstream narrative films work. The very function of plot (as opposed to story) is to delimit character in ways that serve the story. It's just that there are tastier ways to go about doing so.

Celebrities on Hot Ones try two hotter sauces including Hot Ones: The Last Dab, a show creation with a Scoville measurement of 2,000,000+. As host Sean Evans (the hottest one of all!) explains: "There's a real culinary challenge to making something that's hot and tasty. Anyone can make something hot." With Unsane, Soderbergh is that cheap, anonymous anyone, an intermittently prestigious director who has forgotten that most viewers prefer not to suck on a battery for 98 minutes.

 Grade: F

*I consider it a spiritual triumph to have avoided the 2007 remake.