Review: Loveless, Unsane, The Song Keepers

Caught between his divorcing parents, with neither wanting him, Alexei takes matters into his own hands and runs away.

Matvey Novikov plays a son unwanted in his parent’s divorce plans in Loveless.

If you’re interested in finding out more about life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia — not the political side of life but the ordinary, everyday lives of “typical” Russians — you need look no further than the films of the masterful director Andrey Zvyagintsev: The ­Return (2003), The Banishment (2007), Elena (2011), Leviathan (2014) and now Loveless are not only among the best films made anywhere in the world over the past 15 years but also provide with what appears to be pinpoint accuracy an insight into the state of the Russian nation.

Leviathan was set in the icy north and ­explored the corruption apparently endemic in the system, but Loveless, which unfolds in St Petersburg in winter, is, like Elena, a far more intim­ate look at a society that could be described­ in the same way as Hamlet’s Denmark — there’s something rotten here.

This is a movie about a family — husband, wife and 12-year-old son. They live in a comfortable apartment, both of the adults have jobs, so they have no visible shortages. Everything should be fine. Except that it isn’t. Boris (Alexey Rozin) and his icily beautiful wife Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) have fallen out of love with one another. Each has a new partner: Boris’s girlfriend Masha (Marina Vasileva) is heavily pregnant, and Zhenya has been fortunate enough to find a richer, older lover in Anton (Andris Keiss), who takes her to fancy restaurants and spoils her. No wonder, then, that Boris and Zhenya can’t wait to sell their apartment and start their new lives, though in the case of Boris all this has to be handled with discretion. He works in the office of a company run by a Christian fundamentalist who is so strict that divorcees are not employed there. Still, with a bit of luck Boris’s marital status can be kept a secret.

The problem is their son, Alexei (Matvey Novikov), and how he fits into all of this. ­Neither parent really wants custody of him — he would only interfere with their plans. The neglected boy weeps quietly in his bedroom while his parents discuss sending him to boarding school. Then, one day he disappears. His teacher calls to say he hasn’t attended school for the past two days.

In a Hollywood film this crisis might be enough to drive the anxious parents closer ­together again, but this isn’t a Hollywood film. Just as Michelangelo Antonioni used the dis­appearance of a key character to explore the lives of those left behind in L’avventura (1959), so Zvyagintsev employs Alexei’s disappearance in ways that further analyse this malaise-afflicted society. The police are unhelpful, so Boris and Zhenya seek the help of a vigilante organisation of private investigators. Posters are pasted up across the city; decaying and empty buildings that once might have been Soviet-era schools or other sorts of community centres are searched. The parents even make the long road trip to a township near Moscow where Zhenya’s mother lives — and meeting this disagreeable old woman gives a pretty clear insight into why her daughter is the way she is.

Corruption and selfishness, plus a kind of indifference to the fates of even those supposedly near and dear. Is this what Russia is really like today? Obviously there’s more to it than this, but this cold yet extremely gifted director’s dissection of his society is never less than riveting.

If Loveless reflects modern Russia, what does Unsane tell us about contemporary America? In Steven Soderbergh’s new film, a young woman is so terrified by a stalker, who has ­followed her from one city to another, that in her confusion she unwittingly signs papers that commit her to a mental institution — some kind of insurance fraud is involved, perpetrated apparently by the people who run the instit­ution. This is a society in which the threat of violence permeates every level of life. Of course Soderbergh’s film, unlike Zvyagnitsev’s, is a thriller, and quite a preposterous one at that, and yet it seems real enough to suggest that it reflects aspects of contemporary America.

Claire Foy impresses as the fightened heroine in Soderbergh’s Unsane.

The central character is Sawyer Valentini, played by the British actress Claire Foy (who will be familiar to viewers of The Crown). Sawyer has just relocated from Boston to Pittsburgh and has secured an office job. Her smarmy boss — who unsubtly makes sexual advances ­towards her while sitting at a desk covered with photos of his family — is happy with her work. But Sawyer is terrified that the stalker who forced her to leave Boston has followed her here — is that him she glimpses in the office?

For recreation, Sawyer uses a dating service to meet a guy in a bar; she takes him home, tells him he’ll get what he wants, confirms that the affair will last for one night only, then throws him out when he starts to get passionate.

What’s wrong with her? She seeks the help of a counsellor at Highland Creek Behavioural Centre and is incautious enough to mention that she’s contemplated suicide. Before she completely realises the implications of this, she is incarcerated in the centre, sharing a large ward with mentally challenged people of both sexes, including Violet (Juno Temple) and Nate (Jay Pharoah).

For a while Soderbergh and screenwriters Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer keep you guessing. Maybe Sawyer really is deranged, maybe the “stalker” she claims to see is a figment of her imagination. But then maybe he’s not, and maybe he’s succeeded in infiltrating the centre as a staff member. As long as there remains a doubt in the mind of the viewer, the film poses intriguing questions about sanity. But eventually it lurches into a full-blown suspense thriller involving a very frightened lady and a very sadistic killer. While Unsane unfolds it’s pretty easy to enjoy it as a teasingly manipul­ative suspense movie. However it’s a movie that doesn’t repay any kind of serious analysis. It’s simply unbelievable on any number of levels.

There are compensations, one of them purely technical. Soderbergh himself photographed the film (under his usual alias of Peter Andrews) entirely on an iPhone. This gives it a very different look, a cramped intensity that makes the claustrophobic mental institution, with its long corridors and padded cell in the basement, ­unusually creepy. Soderbergh also edited the film under another alias (Mary Ann Bernard) — there’s not much space for a large crew on a movie such as this.

The other reason to see Unsane lies in the quality of the acting. Foy is impressive as the frightened heroine; Amy Irving is also good in her few scenes as Sawyer’s supportive mother, and Joshua Leonard enigmatically portrays one of the nursing staff in the facility.

Yes, Unsane is rather silly — but thriller ­lovers can have fun with it.

Naina Sen’s feature documentary The Song Keepers is having limited screenings around the country. It’s about an amazing group of ­Aboriginal women from the Northern Territ­ory, members of a choir, who tour Germany performing hymns originally introduced to their forebears by Lutheran missionaries, now adapted into Aboriginal languages. Though a bit repetitive, the film is a satisfying celebration of these women, their conductor, Morris Stuart, and their music.

Loveless (Nelyubov) (tbc) 4.5 stars

Limited national release from Thursday

Unsane (tbc) 3.5 stars

National release from Thursday

The Song Keepers (G) 3 stars

Limited release