Side Effects: A Pill Makes You Murder

TV commercials for virility or antidepressant medications often devote most of their two-minute spiels to describing the awful incidental maladies that may befall the pill-taker. By the end of the Doomsday small print, youre likely to think: That which makes me stronger may also kill me. A similar warning should attend any review of Side Effects.Revealing the usual amount of plot would be unfair to viewers with a right to be as surprised as most critics have been. Directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Scott Z. Burns, who previously collaborated on the twisty thrillers Contagion and The Informant!,the new movieis like a secret too cool to keep but too treacherous to share. Side Effectsvirtually demands a three-word review: Just see it.

Soderbergh has said that this is the last movie he will direct for a while. (Hes got a TV film, the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, set for airing on HBO later this year.) The industrys most prodigious auteur may be entitled to a rest. Now in his 25th year since his 1989 debut withsex, lies and videotape, Soderbergh has directed 25 features, including eight in the last five years. Hes also an active producer, shepherding such films asPleasantville,Far from Heavenand his former business partner George ClooneysMichael ClaytonandGood Night, and Good Luck.On his own films hes a one-man crew, serving as both cinematographer (under his fathers Christian names Peter Andrews) and editor (under his mothers maiden name, Mary Ann Bernard). More efficient than inspired, Soderbergh rarely succeeds on style alone, but when giving a sharp script, like the one for Side Effects, he can make an excellent film. If this is his swan song, its got a haunting melody.

(SEE: the Side Effects trailer)

The first half-hour lulls audiences into settling in for a screed against Big Pharma, unscrupulous doctors, and the American belief in better living, right now and forever, through chemistry. Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), a young Manhattanite with a sensitive, fragile demeanor, swaps pill lore with her boss (Polly Draper), who says, I had better luck with Celexa as if feel-good medications were an online dating service for incurable optimists. Keep shopping around and hope for the best.

(READ: Corliss on the Soderbergh-Burns medical thriller Contagion)

Emilys psychiatrist, Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), has prescribed Zoloft and then a number of drugs that regulate serotonin, because it just stops the brain from telling you to feel sad. But these drugs cant calm the roiling urges inside Emily, whose Wall Street husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just been released from prison after a four-year stretch for insider trading. She looked forward to seeing the man she loved, yet is unresponsive in bed. At a party at which Martin is uncomfortably welcomed back by his old colleagues, she glances at a mirror and see her own cracked visage. In the parking garage of their highrise, she revs up her car and drives it into a wall.

(SEE: Wook Kims choice of Top 10 Movie Shrinks)

When Emily lived with Martin in posh Greenwich, Conn., before his fall, she consulted another shrink, Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), To Banks, the imperious Dr. Siebert recommends a new antidepressant called Ablixa, even as the companys salesmen offer Banks a $50,000 honorarium for testing the drug and prescribing it to his patients. Take Ablixa today, the ads read, and take back tomorrow. Emily doesnt have to wait that long for Ablixa to kick in: her sex with Martin is instantly zesty. Whoever makes this drug, he exclaims in postcoital rapture, is going to be fin rich. But there are side effects, says the movie, whose own ad copy reads, In some cases, death may occur.

(READ: Corliss on the Soderbergh-Burns industrial-corruption thriller The Informant!)

So Side Effects is a murder mystery. No spoiler alert needed here. The films first shot, tracking through the Manhattan sky toward the Taylor residence, may remind you of the opening of Psycho: a slow advance toward furtive sex and eventual death. The second shot, inside their apartment, follows a trail of blood, as if a body had been dragged across the floor; and we are in the urban equivalent of a Bates Motel room. Later on,around the 45-minute mark, a major character will get diced and spliced by a kitchen knife, as Janet Leigh was in Psycho. To cement the kinship between the two films, the Side Effects publicists mimicked Alfred Hitchcocksmaster stroke of promotion: critics would not be admitted to early screenings after the film began.

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Side Effects: A Pill Makes You Murder