Movie review: 'Side Effects' and the perils of pills for psychic self-defense

Love and Other Drugs already expostulated with definitive, exhaustive authority on the small-scale effects of maintenance pills on long-time Parkinsons sufferers and its potential for comedy, relationship drama, and the medical rep trade. Good thing director Steven Soderbergh takes a completely different, serious tack with Side Effects.

Revealing any of the twists (at least the two major ones) would completely ruin the experience of this whodunit of a thriller for you, so well keep this review to the bare bones.

This movie gleefully dives into the ramifications of pharmaceutical treatment for psychological ills, specifically on anti-depressant drugs.

We begin with Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), who is one truly depressed woman. Her husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), has just been released from prison after serving four years for insider trading. He would have gotten away clean but, like many financial guys on the up and up, he got greedy and he got sloppy. So, he got caught.

While Emily and Martins mom are amped that hes out of the big house, the family is still at ground zero when it comes to money. While she claims theres no connection to their financial woes, Emily shortly afterwards drives her car right smack into the concrete wall of an underground parking lot. Apparent suicide attempt? Everybody seems to think so.

From there on shes prescribed a number of anti-depressant medications. Thing is, none of them work.

The crime aspect of this movie can actually be traced to that session when Dr Banks prescribes Emily a drug that shes never been on. This switch, and the resulting cocktail of the other stuff shes on, has the alleged, unintentional side effects of the title.

Soderbergh has outdone himself here. This time he takes on the minutiae of the day-to-day grind of a depressives life. He shows how it is to have a growing dependence on a pharmacy in your bathroom cabinet as opposed to the macro scale of the illegal drug trades explosive casualties in Traffic.

In fact, there are so many layers of commentary here that turn on the dime of the narrative twists that its sometimes hard to keep track of them all. They blend and blur and eventually fuse into one another like the effects of a mood-altering pill. . .and a pill to take the edge off that, and another to counteract the effects thereof.

To appreciate what happens in this narrative its useful to have a basic understanding of whats called synergism or the synergistic effect.

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Movie review: 'Side Effects' and the perils of pills for psychic self-defense