(The man they wrestle with, incidentally, enters dressed as a woman and brandishing a knife. She winds up stuck in a padded cell, and the color of the padding, not a clinical white but an inky blue, somehow aggravates her ordeal, and stains it with the hue of a bad dream.īut could it all be a dream, or a delusion, and how weary are we of movies that persist in asking that question? It seemed hokey enough in 1930, in “ The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case,” at the end of which our heroes awake from a violent struggle. She’s detained for only a day, but her protests are so militant that her stay is lengthened to a week. Unwittingly, though voluntarily, Sawyer has agreed to be committed. She is asked to complete a form, and, if the movie has a message to impart, it is this: always read the fine print. Suffering from panic attacks (a Tinder date goes wretchedly wrong), Sawyer seeks help-nothing special, a brief consultation during her lunch hour-at Highland Creek, a mental-health facility. Anyone with a name like that can kiss goodbye to a quiet life, yet that is what Sawyer has pursued, by moving to an unfamiliar city and getting a job as an analyst in a bank. “Unsane” tells the story of Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy). I found it as coarse as canvas, though you have to admire Soderbergh for adding a new vista to his vision. “I think this is the future,” he says, describing the look of the movie as “velvet.” You could have fooled me. In interviews, Soderbergh has rhapsodized over this liberating method, and sworn to employ it on projects to come. (Not that he is the first to go down this route Sean Baker used an earlier-model iPhone, in 2015, to make “ Tangerine.”) The practical benefits of carrying your main creative tool around in your breast pocket are fairly clear “Unsane” was reportedly shot in just over a week. Such beauty could be summoned by the beast.Īnd so to the news that Steven Soderbergh, never one to shy from experimentation, filmed his latest work, “ Unsane,” on an iPhone 7 Plus-on three iPhones, in fact. Howe, like Hitchcock, knew that the cumbersome effort was worthwhile, for the result would be a rolling expanse of fine-grained images, filling the audience’s gaze. James Wong Howe, a king among cinematographers, used VistaVision on “ The Rose Tattoo” (1955), and there’s a portrait of him with a similar camera, which towers above him on its wheeled crane, and which he holds by a cable, as if leading a velociraptor through Jurassic Park. And what a formidable beast that camera is: as big as a motorbike but far less streamlined, bearing on its broad flank the legend “VistaVision”-the wide-screen format in which Hitchcock also shot “ To Catch a Thief” (1955), “ The Man who Knew Too Much” (1956), and “ Vertigo” (1958). He holds her lightly by the arm, smiling, as she stands behind the camera on which the sequence will be filmed. They are clad for the auction scene he wears a pale-gray suit, and her dress is rich in roses. There is a lovely photograph of James Mason and Eva Marie Saint on the set of “ North by Northwest” (1959).
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