Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Sarah Stiles, Marc Kudish, Amy Irving, Colin Woodell, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Linda Mauze, Zach Cherry, Polly McKie, Jay Pharoah, Raúl Castillo, Juno Temple, Michael Mihm, Robert Kelly, Natalie Gold, Sol Marino Crespo, Will Brill, Stephen Maier, Matthew R. Staley, Matt Mancini, Emily Happe, Gibson Frazier, Erin Wilhelmi, Aimee Mullins, Joseph Reidy, Erika Rolfsrud, Elizabeth Goodman.
The way we look at health care in Britain is one that consumes the minds of most who see one of our greatest national achievements as a political football, for some a timebomb that cannot be afforded, for others an essential service that must be maintained whatever the cost. There are those who look across the Atlantic and see the private sector as the answer, insurance premiums, the free market, the sense of you are ill, then your cover will take care of it, an incentive to stay fit and well. It is a premise clouded, disturbing, chilling to right minded people and one that doesn’t work in practise when it has the chance to be abused.
It is abuse, personal, social and government led policies towards health care that sits at the heart of Unsane, a film which leads the viewer down the hole of corruption and the sense of corroded neglect which comes when people are given the financial incentive to find fault with another human being, when the guidelines for those who admit to having the sometimes thoughts of suicide and self harm are treated as cash cows to be exploited.
It is not a thought that will sit well with the majority of people who watch it, an alien presence in the thoughts, that the sick are treated as a commodity, and that even the abused can turn out to be pretty adept in the struggle to dish out the violence and cruelty in return.
Unsane is a film in which Claire Foy, Juno Temple and Joshua Leonard excel as much as they are able to but one that as psychological study in terror is for all intense purposes lacking in the actual meat that would have given this cinematic creature absolute substance. It is a pity to have both Juno Temple and Claire Foy especially more to deal with in the build up to final reveal, they both have a presence that demands to be felt and it is with sadness in respect that the mixture of corporate medical dishonesty isn’t given the full treatment and that the sideways glance given to manipulation isn’t teased out to its fullest possible content.
Unsane is a good film, of that there is no argument but it is one that doesn’t grip fully the possibilities that could have been explored, the depths of the situation in which Claire Foy’s character found herself in and one that only half grasps the disturbing nature of private health care. In a world that never plays with a reasonable sense of fairness, and one in which madness is subjective, Unsane tries its best to satisfy two directions of thought at the same time but regrettably doesn’t quite connect with satisfaction.
Ian D. Hall