Side Effects (2013)

Emily Taylor is a young woman who is not in the best of spirits. At the beginning of Side Effects, we see her outside a prison gate, waiting for her husband to be released. He has been gone for years and they have become rather emotionally disconnected. The next day, Emily is in a parking garage; she gets in her car and rams it into a wall. She survives and is given antidepressants by a doctor who has been hired by a new medical company to test out some new pills on patients. Our heroine begins acting strangely and sleepwalking in the night. During one such trance, she stabs her husband repeatedly and doesn’t remember it in the morning. This happens about halfway through and in any other movie would be a spoiler for me to mention it. This is not any other movie.

February and March are usually dreary months for movie critics. They are sort of a cinematic limbo in-between the great award season movies and the decent summer blockbusters. Studios like to dump all their crap onto these months in the hope of making a buck off of them during the draught. I seem to remember that about this time last year, Steven Soderbergh saved the day with his excellent action movie Haywire. Here he is again with a mystery movie that actually delivers what it promises. It’s possible that I’m a complete idiot, but Side Effects thoroughly fooled me. It’s really two separate movie joined together: the one you think is happening and the one actually happening. I admit that the end results were a little too lengthy for their own good. The explanation could only be anti-climactic after how long we are kept in the dark. That section of the movie that keeps all its cards concealed until the last moment is superb. If I didn’t catch on, I would like to think that most people won’t.

Rooney Mara stars in a role that requires her to behave in the exact opposite way she did when she stunned us all in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last year. In that, she was strong and powerful. In this, she is timid and fragile, and still stunning. If the movie were to be compared to a magic trick, Mara is the card up Soderbergh’s sleeve. She is the key ingredient in the movie’s successful manipulation of its audience, and it would never have worked without her. Also good, but possibly a little too frantic, is Jude Law as the psychiatrist who turns makeshift detective when things start going awry. Catherine Zeta-Jones also appears in a supporting role of (thankfully) some substance. Hidden behind a dorky-librarian-esque façade, she is yet another one of the pieces of the puzzle that doesn’t seem to fit until, of course, it does.

This is all film trickery at its finest. I enjoyed it a great deal and would certainly recommend at least one viewing for the curious. On the other hand, is it something that will stand up after repeat viewings? Probably not, but it’s a great ride while it lasts.

8/10