14 February 2013
Directed By: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Channing Tatum, Jude Law, Rooney Mara and Catherine Zeta-Jones
What It’s About: A young woman begins to take a prescribed drug that has unusual side effects.
Rated R (Nudity, sexuality, violence and language)
Runtime: 106 minutes
By Shelby Clemons, Staff Writer
Side Effects may include: unexpected consequences of a lethal drug, the deterioration of a psychiatrist’s career and the inability to detect sanity. Side Effects is a psychological thriller that possesses such realness that the audience doesn’t know who to trust. With more twists than a Six Flags rollercoaster, it’s hard to articulate a description of this movie without giving everything away.
To put it simply, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) is reunited with her husband Martin (Channing Tatum), who has been in jail for the last four years for insider trading. Despite her attempts to be happy, depression and anxiety hit Emily when she tries to deal with her changing life.
After a suicide attempt, Emily decides to see a psychiatrist to avoid being hospitalized. Enter Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who becomes personally involved in Emily’s case and prescribes a new drug, Ablixa, after other drugs fail.
Dr. Banks begins prescribing the trial drug to get rich quick, but the unprecedented side effects of it cause a violent outburst from Emily, which turns into a massive outbreak of blame and mistrust towards Dr. Banks from his own patients, the media and perhaps even the audience itself.
As his career collapses before his eyes, Dr. Banks is still eager to help Emily in whatever way he can. But when suspicious circumstances of her story begin to surface, Banks has to try and piece things together to save himself, and the stage is set for the multitude of thrilling plot twists.
The audience is left with a million questions: do we trust Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta Jones), Emily’s old psychiatrist that later becomes Dr. Banks’ worst enemy? Is Dr. Banks just an ethically corrupt doctor, or a man trying to save his life after an accident he has no responsibility for? Is Emily as innocent as she looks?
Though Side Effects seems confusing at times and feels like it’s not answering all of our questions, it’s this not knowing that makes it so thrilling. Its many twists can be overwhelming, but its realism makes it exciting. The film looks deeply into the depravity of the mental health industry and is brilliant in its execution of presenting things that happen every day.
Every character seems to have his or her own secrets, and the actors do a good job at not giving away who they really are. Jude Law excellently portrays a doctor desperate to save his own skin, and Catherine Zeta Jones equally amazes as a twisted doctor looking to make a quick buck. Rooney Mara seems to do a poor job as an innocent woman desperately trying to escape her tortured life, but the twists prove that Mara is more than meets the eye and beg the question: who’s really crazy?
Director Steven Soderbergh claims the film will be his last, and it’s not a bad place to leave off. The filming style matches the sheer desperation of an anxiety-ridden woman by often making the audience feel that we are looking through her eyes. It also captures the thrill of every abrupt twist, shattering and blacking out with the crash of a car and blurring with shocking admissions.
Side Effects shatters all reliability in every one of its characters and does so while being an amazing psychological thriller. The audience doesn’t want to know who to trust, because with every breath there is something new and exciting to learn about the film’s complex plot. It meshes crime, corruption and even marital issues all into one excellent psychological thriller. The film goes deeper than any of its trailers indicate. Side Effects may leave viewers confused, thrilled and disturbed, because it is certainly more than meets the eye.
Courtesy of www.shockya.com