Review of Side Effects (2013) by Andrew W — 19 Oct 2013

Side Effects (2013) - Directed by Steven Soderbergh.

Soderbergh's stuff is always worth a watch, the emphasis on detail, character study, great dialogue and ultra-realism which, whilst undoubtedly laudable, sometimes means our Hollywood-primed expectations fail to be met. Contagion (2010) was a perfect example of this, a worldwide pandemic caused by a bird flu like virus is killing A list celebrities, realism trumping escapism throughout the film, which was critically acclaimed, and something - you know the running, jumping and explosions - is lost.

In Side Effects Jude Law plays a conflicted English man, not an uncommon casting decision for him. He's a psychiatrist who's on duty one night when a road traffic victim comes through his A&E department. She admits to driving her car straight at a wall and he becomes her head doctor as he tries to help her through a debilitating depression. Meanwhile, the woman's husband, a former trader who's served time for insider dealing, is struggling to build his life now he's on the outside again. There are several scenes where we see him and her struggling to cope with her depressive illness. Around twenty-five minutes in when you're settling in still trying to find the narrative centre of this tale, it twists and takes a direction that's quite unexpected. Rooney Mara's character, Emily, the depressed wife, takes things to a whole new level on the tower block of mental illness by getting in a fugue state and stabbing her husband in the back with a kitchen knife.

Tatum Channing, who we might have confidently expected to stay the narrative course he is such a rising star in Hollywood, collapses to the linoleum and breathes no more. This murder embroils Jude Law's character in a scandal around the medication he'd prescribed her for her mental illness as it begins to emerge that there may have been some unpleasant side effects hushed up during its trials.

This psychological what-the-hell-is-really-going-on-arama is eminently watchable, Jude Law is always great to watch and a plastic lipped Catherine Zeta Jones makes a surprising intervention as the lesbian lover of Rooney Mara's character in the final two-thirds of the story. Again our expectations are surprised when what we thought might be a genuine medical drama, along the lines of Coma from the 1980s, about the dangers of untested drugs rushed to market, turns out to be something else entirely. I won't say what as it will spoil the denouement for you. Needless to say, what we originally thought was going on, Jude Law trying to help a depressed woman rebuild her life, is simply the distraction technique for the true intrigue here. I did manage to unpick most of the plot by the mid-point but my rapid guesses were only seventy percent right, which in escapologist terms would mean I'd have only wriggled out of the arms and torso of the straight jacket before the rope snapped and I was plunged head-first into the tank of starving piranha, a wonderful image but not quite good enough in my own personal race to decrypt the plots of the film's I watch.

The twists and turns are well delivered, the story treats its audience with a respectful intelligence, it was just a bit slow to get going and there were no explosions at all.

*** Three stars.