Unsane - father issues

Spoilers ahead...

It is apparent that Sawyer has some kind of issue with her father - when her mother mentions him she shuts the conversation down. Later, when speaking to Nate I think she says her father died when she was 15 - cut to her reading to an elderly man in the hospice and then a funeral scene. These scenes are a bit confusing - she certainly doesn't look 15 in them.

Later we find out that the man in the hospice and in the coffin was David's father - this is very confusing, are David and Sawyer siblings or half-siblings? No, we soon find out that Sawyer worked at the hospice and this is where she first met David.

What is the point of these of these mis-directions? - to me they are just confusing and don't serve the plot in any way. However, I'm sure that with a director of the calibre of Soderbergh they must be deliberate.

Best Answer

Sawyer was reading to Davids father at the hospice because she was volunteering and that was her duty, they have no family relationship at all. I agree that she didn't look much younger in the hospice flashback, but I believe that the hospice volunteering job was only 2 years before the movie took place. When sawyer is yelling at david in the isolation room, she says that he basically wasted 2 years of his life by stalking her.

David was attracted to Sawyer because he thought they were similar in the sense that they both lost their fathers. But obviously sawyers dad died much earlier, but david is psychotic so the initial idea of bonding with sawyer over their lost fathers was what initially attracted him to her.