Editor’s Note: Unsane is available on Amazon Prime beginning August 17, 2018.

Unsane doesn’t take the form of a horror film; at first, it appears to be a Hitchcockian thriller about mistaken identity or perhaps getting ensnared in a web of bureaucracy. Yet with clinical detachment it develops into a nerve-flaying story almost too agonizing to endure. Unlike most horror movies, it isn’t pretend-scary. It searches for your sensitive points and tends to them with a cheese grater.

The film is yet another triumph from director Steven Soderbergh, one of the most restless, productive, unpredictable, and catholic creators of filmed entertainment working today, or ever. Just in the past seven years he has directed a shelf full of mostly superb movies: Contagion, Haywire, Magic Mike, Side Effects, Behind the Candelabra, and Logan Lucky, plus 27 combined hours of the TV series The Knick and Mosaic. For four of these years, Soderbergh insisted that he was retired. Before all that, there was Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brockovich, etc., etc. Soderbergh’s name on a project means it’s automatically going to be interesting, usually in a way that subverts expectations.

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Soderbergh’s new film has a gimmick: It was shot entirely on iPhones, which yields harsh, unforgiving images to heighten the realistic feel of the movie, the sense that we’re watching found footage taken from well-placed security cameras. The look adds to the chill in the air as a professional woman named Sawyer (Claire Foy, the star of Netflix’s The Crown) goes about her job as a financial analyst in Philadelphia. Her boss praises her work, then mentions an upcoming conference in New Orleans. Hey, maybe she and he should go together? She’d rather not, but how to tell him and stay employed?

The foundation is established: Unwanted male attention can be tricky. But Soderbergh goes far deeper with it, showing just how alarming it can be, and many women will find this movie too trying to watch as we learn more about Sawyer’s history with a stalker she fled in Boston. As a volunteer at a hospice, she tried to give some solace to a dying man by reading to him, but the man’s adult son (Joshua Leonard) became fixated on her, and she had to get a restraining order to hold him at bay. Meanwhile, after a Google search for expert therapists in an unfamiliar new city, she consults a psychiatrist for some coping strategies. Instead, after filling out a few routine forms, she finds she’s committed herself to a mental hospital for an entire week. And the guy in charge of handing out pills at the place? He looks a lot like the stalker.

Soderbergh and the screenwriters Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer leave open the questions of whether Sawyer deserves to be committed and whether the staffers and psychiatrists have her best interests in mind. She did, after all, confess to a therapist that she has given thought to harming herself. The orderly at the hospital might be, as it appears, just an ordinary guy doing his job instead of a psycho who has followed her from Boston with intent to do her harm. You get the sense that, with the help of her mother (Amy Irving) and a kind fellow patient (Jay Pharoah) who lets her use his phone, she might walk away from this seemingly dire situation unscathed, it all being a silly misunderstanding. On the other hand, there might be murder in the offing.

Soderbergh expertly takes every woman’s fear that some creep might become obsessed with her and painstakingly fashions a harrowing worst-case scenario, each step happening with matter-of-fact plausibility. Most horror movies take place in some fanciful setting — in a haunted house, for instance, or (these days) amid a crazed murder cult of racist white suburbanites. The entertainment value is related to the escapism inherent in playing along with a situation we know would never happen. Unsane takes place in a world exactly like our own, though; we’ve all been presented with a sheaf of forms in a medical professional’s office and filled them out quickly without paying too much attention to what we’ve signed.

[pullquote align=”left”]Long before a drop of blood is shed on the screen, the movie had me in a cold sweat. [/pullquote]

Gently sliding each piece into place like a carpenter blandly assembling a guillotine, Soderbergh creates something close to the perfect horror movie for our time. Sawyer is dragged into a Kafkaesque nightmare by male sexual aggression and also by a combination of therapy culture; modern medical care, with its tendency toward de-personalization; social-media habits offering fearsome tracking possibilities (amusingly explained to us in a surprise cameo appearance by a leading movie star); indifferent bureaucracies in general; and (my favorite) health-insurance scams. Long before a drop of blood is shed on the screen, the movie had me in a cold sweat. Freddy Krueger doesn’t faze me. What’s truly terrifying is having to fill out forms from Aetna.