For the so-called final Steven Soderbergh film to be screened in theaters, which you can easily take with a grain of salt, SIDE EFFECTS is a way to go out on. The psychological thriller is a nicely underplayed movie whose messages and answers reside in the silence. It features a cast of characters who believe in the power of prescribed medicine yet do not notice that they all are forever in the dark about what a drug can do to the human system, including the ones studying, prescribing and pushing them out to the public. It also actively plays with your plot expectations but this decision by Soderbergh and buddy/writer Scott Z. Burns may prove distasteful for those expecting a smear job to the Prozac Nation.
Rooney Mara plays Emily, a young woman whose life should be for the better, now that her husband (Channing Tatum) is finally released after a lengthy prison stay. Instead, the reconnection is just another strike to her debilitating self-esteem and psyche. After a failed suicide attempt, she is placed under the care of Dr. Banks (Jude Law), a hotshot psychiatrist with a beautiful wife and kid and a popular candidate by drug companies for pushing their new medicine. After testing out other choices and some consideration from Emily's previous doctor (Catherine Zeta-Jones), he prescribes to her a new anti-depressant drug on the market called Ablixa to curb her suicidal tendencies. Though it seemingly cures her, she starts to suffer odd effects to the new drug, all leading up to a shocking turn of events and a major twist to the story's structure.
This twist does hamper the film's supposed theme of how the world has become depended on prescription medicine and humans are now the forever test patients for major corporations. Soderbergh's builds and fortifies the theme with his popular acid glow visual aesthetics and suffocating close-ups or crowd shots only to then swipe the board clean and start anew. Despite this egregious thematic misdireciton, the second half is compelling and thankfully continues the psychological thrills. It does lead up to some exciting shocks and an ending that is both fulfilling to the audience, story-wise and film-wise, while also being a depressing, exploitative answer to human misery. The cast is overall great, with Mara and Law spending most of the time in focus as two unstable balls of confusion and loathing. It's a dark mystery but it proves to be enticing enough to come under its sway.
FINAL REVIEW: 4 / 5
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