REVIEW: Unsane is the first major Hollywood movie shot entirely on an iPhone ... and it’s a chiller!

REVIEW: Unsane is the first Hollywood movie shot entirely on an iPhone ... and it’s a chiller of a thriller! Claire Foy of Netflix’s The Crown gets locked up in an asylum against her will.

Claire Foy in a scene from the movie Unsane. 20th Century Fox films.

UNSANE (MA15+)

Rating: Three stars (3 out of 5)

Director: Steven Soderbergh (Logan Lucky)

Starring: Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Amy Irvine.

A little commitment could lose her the lot

An attention-grabbing thriller to say the least, Unsane boasts both one hell of a gimmick (it was shot entirely on an iPhone) and one hellish premise (the nightmare of not being able to leave somewhere you never should have been).

Claire Foy in a scene from the movie Unsane. 20th Century Fox films.

Claire Foy (best known for the Netflix series The Crown) stars as Sawyer Valentini, a nervy young woman still reeling from a bad experience with a stalker.

The creep’s name was David Striner (Joshua Leonard), and getting him excised from her life has left Sawyer carrying some hefty psychological baggage.

Moving several states away from family and friends to start a new job has not lightened the load. Sawyer sometimes thinks she has seen Striner’s face in the distance near her workplace.

After attributing this and other troubles (dating is almost impossible) to the ongoing trauma left in the wake of the stalking case, Sawyer thinks it would be a good idea to find herself a new therapist.

Claire Foy in a scene from the movie Unsane. 20th Century Fox films.

An initial consultation with a local practitioner seems to go quite well. Sawyer is asked to fill out a form she thinks will secure further appointments. Instead, Sawyer finds herself ‘accidentally’ committed to a private psychiatric facility.

The more she protests her predicament, the longer her unsympathetic handlers extend her stay. Can it get any worse? Well, there’s a new male nurse on staff who Sawyer believes is really David Striner.

Then again, it could just be a figment of the potent medication being pumped into her whenever it is deemed she has misbehaved.

The rustic, stressfully up-close shooting style of director Steven Soderbergh (Logan Lucky) does work over the viewer good and proper.

Claire Foy in a scene from the movie Unsane. 20th Century Fox films.

For a movie filmed entirely on a phone (albeit with the aid of specially tooled lenses and filters), Unsane’s unorthodox visual aesthetic does not prove too much of a distraction at all after a while.

Whether it papers over some rather large holes in the plot will be the maker or breaker for some onlookers, however.

As for Foy, a definite rising star on the movie scene, hers is a classy performance in relatively trashy surrounds. If you are still going with the frenzied flow of this strange tale by the end, the fault is all hers.

Originally published as REVIEW: Unsane is the first major Hollywood movie shot entirely on an iPhone ... and it’s a chiller!