I was one of many people who expressed their unrestrained sorrow when Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement from filmmaking in 2013. A director who rarely remained stagnant, and defied genre and conventions in the endeavor to create a fulfilling and fascinating filmography, one that featured films that may have varied in quality, but were all relentlessly audacious and original, most of the time. Luckily, Soderbergh seems to have had a different definition for the word “retirement”, because very soon, he was back in the world of filmmaking, with one of his more recent films being Unsane. I was initially very reluctant to see Unsane, mainly because while it has an interesting concept, it seemed like more of a stunt rather than a fully-formed film. My expectations were not only met, but utterly shattered, with Unsane being top-tier Soderbergh, a film so riveting and engaging, and more than anything else, astonishingly terrifying throughout. Unsane is undeniably one of Soderbergh’s better films, and it sees him playing with genre to glowingly successful results. It is always wonderful to find a film that you had previously not thought very much of, only to have it become one of your favorites of the year. Unsane is a strange film, but a brilliant one.

Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) has just moved to Philadelphia for unclear reasons. A confident and successful individual, she finds a place at a local bank, where she makes an impact almost immediately and wins the respect of her co-workers and the relentless praise of her employer. However, it is soon revealed that she didn’t merely move to Philadelphia – she fled from Boston, trying to escape a stalker (Joshua Leonard) who had been terrorizing her for a while, making her life uncomfortable and generally unsafe. The traumatic experience still haunts Sawyer, and she seeks out help from a local hospital, only to find out that she has been involuntarily admitted to the psychiatric ward, with seemingly no way of escaping. She tries to find her way out, but when a terrifying new obstacle finds its way into that mental ward, Sawyer herself starts to contemplate her own sanity, and as the days go on, her release seems to grow less likely, as the sinister secrets of the institution become more clear to our troubled protagonist.

Claire Foy has, in the span of only a few years, already become a highly-acclaimed actress, and through her elegant portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown, she has become an actress who the world has been taking careful note of. Unsane gives Foy a character that is complex and fascinating and allows her the opportunity to explore the wide-range of emotions a character like this would experience when trying to escape from an uncomfortable past. It is not a groundbreaking performance, and it is a role that could have effectively been played by nearly any actress, but what Foy does with this character is really consistently good, and she imbues Sawyer with nuance and complexities that would otherwise be missing from many other actresses. Foy is able to convey willful strength and paranoid fear equally well, and while this is certainly not the performance that will define her career, it is certainly a welcome addition to a career only growing exponentially in diverse and interesting choices. Accompanying Foy in this film is a set of actors who give dedicated and spirited performances, all worth mentioning. Joshua Leonard has one of the most terrifying characters of the year with his performance as Sawyer’s obsessive stalker, creating a truly memorable villain who is amongst the most sinister of the past few years. Jay Pharoah, who was previously known mainly for his comedic work, shows a rare dramatic flair with his pivotal role as the only other sane person in the institution, who naturally befriends Sawyer. Amy Irving and Juno Temple are also terrific in their small roles, as well as Polly McKie, an actress who has not been in many films but gives a scene-stealing performance as the manipulative but strangely dedicated head nurse. The ensemble of Unsane is excellent, and they all work together as a part of the complex mosaic that is this film.

Unsane is a film that would appear to be more of an experiment than actually a fully-formed film. Soderbergh intended to do two very unconventional things with this film: firstly, he filmed it secretly. In an era where everything is highly-publicized and details of every aspect of the filmmaking process are made available, it is a notable achievement to make something that receives absolutely no publicity during the production phase. I find these kinds of experiments endearing (such as last year’s terrific A Ghost Story, the existence of which we only discovered after filmmaking had finished) because it is refreshing to encounter something that has not made its way through the laundromatic world of media scrutiny and analysis. The second experiment, and by far the most distinctive one, was that this film was made entirely using the iPhone 7. This is not the first film to do this (one just needs to look at the wonderful Tangerine or the countless amateur films shot by young people), but it may be the most effective. This was not a decision that was made to cut costs, or because Apple was sponsoring the production – I’d argue that this was a conscious choice, because the nature of filming with such a device results in a distinctively unsettling, uneasy atmosphere. It allows close, intimate contact with the actors, which results in uncomfortable and invasive interactions between the audience and the film. The filmmaking is gritty, simple and brutal, which works perfectly for this film, which benefits massively from the uneasy visual aesthetic.

If there was a very simple way to describe Unsane, it would be with the almost blasphemous description of “if One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest had been directed by Stanley Kubrick” – and Soderbergh seems to relish in his playful use of horror conventions in the making of this film. The filmmaker has never been adverse to exploring elements of the B-movie in his filmmaking, and if Unsane cannot be considered a successful film in and of itself, it is a terrific B-movie, a horror film that offers well-constructed thrills and a simple story that is as horrifying as it is entertaining. The success of Unsane lies in the fact that it is a film far better than what it is perceived as – it goes in various unexpected directions, and even at its most predictable, it elicits genuine fear, especially the haunting climax, which is a masterclass in genre filmmaking. Unsane is certainly not a film that will redefine horror cinema, but it does contribute heavily to the movement towards horror films often containing the most audacious, original work in a modern cinematic landscape. It is a film with great ideas and despicably brilliant technique, and the film is well-aware of its own artificiality, which makes it oddly hilarious at some points, yet it never detracts from the inherent terror contained within this film.

Unsane is one of the most delightful cinematic surprises I’ve had this past year. I was not expecting something as well-crafted as this, and Soderbergh manages to restrain himself to telling a story that follows a very straightforward narrative, with the concept being executed perfectly. It is an unhinged film and one that relies on genre film conventions in creating a truly chilling horror film that understands the limits of what can be represented on film effectively and exceeds those limits. It is a film far more reliant on psychological terror as opposed to immediate scares, and the final result is a film that may not be particularly original in terms of its story, and it may have some shortcomings, but the technological concept was flawlessly executed, and the audacity was utilized well. Regardless of his laughably short retirement, Soderbergh’s time off seems to have served him well, because he has returned with a renewed cinematic energy, and while Unsane may not be a definitive masterpiece, it is one of the filmmaker’s most interesting works, and one that I suspect will grow in reputation as time goes on. Unsane is a really terrifying, but brilliantly complex horror film, and a great addition to the current renaissance of horror cinema.