Unsane: how Steven Soderbergh manages to thrill with just an iPhone

The director's latest film, shot entirely on a phone, is a dizzying deep dive into the psyche of a stalking victim kept in a mental care facility against her will. Contains spoilers

The history of Steven Soderbergh is the history of making do. The steadfast indie director likes doing his movies his way, and when money poses an obstacle to his purity of vision, he's always quick with an industry workaround. He wanted to make a 250-minute account of Che Guevara's life to be spread across two films and shot entirely in the Spanish language, and since Hollywood wasn't interested, he hawked his wares with French and Spanish distributors instead. The big studios refused to release Soderbergh's Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra unless he first recut it, so he bypassed US theaters entirely and found a welcome home at HBO. He managed to free himself from overseer shackles entirely by selling all the streaming and TV rights to Logan Lucky ahead of its release last year, using that capital to finance the film, and then divvying up the box office proceeds among his collaborators instead of suited investors.

Related: Don't call it a comeback: the celebrities who love to 'retire'