EW Movie Reviews: "Side Effects"

Side Effects, Steven Soderberghs entertaining new movie, is a psychopharmacological thriller about a woman named Emily who is functionally depressed. Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment Weekly magazine, has more.

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Side Effects, Steven Soderberghs entertaining new movie, is a psychopharmacological thriller about a woman named Emily who is functionally depressed, a tough quality to dramatize effectively.

Fortunately, shes played by Rooney Mara, who has mastered the trick of how to act recessive and threatening at the same time. In her first leading role since The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Mara transforms herself yet again, this time into a very different specimen of seductive, damaged will.

Emily, an upper-middle-class wastrel-princess, is married to Martin, played by Channing Tatum, whos character has just gotten out of prison after serving four years for insider trading. Shes trying to be there for him, but shes remote, disaffected.

After she crashes her car into a parking-garage wall, a psychiatrist played by Jude Law puts her on a new miracle pill called Ablixa.

In Side Effects, Soderbergh turns a cleverly overwrought, at times knowingly pulpy scenario into a pop projection of our most lurid fears about antidepressants.

The drug Emily is on has a curious side effect. She begins to walk in her sleep. And then, in the middle of her sleepwalking, she does something very, very bad. It becomes a tabloid news story, with Emily as the poster girl for everything that can go wrong when youre using drugs to shift the DNA of how you act, and who you are.

Side Effects is a lavishly dread-fueled suspense movie full of twists, reversals, and double crosses. Soderbergh tweaks the issue of everything we dont really know about antidepressants, and why our society is now addicted to them.

He wants to do for SSRIs what Hitchcock did for psychoanalysis in Spellbound, and for a while he succeeds. But I wish Soderbergh had taken his own movie more seriously. Catherine Zeta-Jones role as a sultry shrink who looks like shes about to strip off her lab coat for an 80s music video is borderline ludicrous, and the films theme of money as the ultimate drug is disappointingly rote.

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EW Movie Reviews: "Side Effects"