Yes, Side Effects gooses us with horror-thriller genre scares (such as Emily’s distorted mug staring back at her in a mirror), but it’s ultimately most provocative for revealing (spoilers herein) that the devil is a woman, pathologically but ingeniously perverting everyone’s perception of her mental weakness to her villainous advantage.
The film flirts with being a hysteric cautionary tale about Big Pharma’s thuggishness only to reveal itself as a rebuke to the very cynicism about public health that Contagion so flagrantly peddles. Through his clever use of confined spaces and reflective surfaces, Soderbergh thrills in keying us to Emily’s off-kilter state of mind, but Side Effects would be boring if it merely struck Contagion’s alarmist stance and stuck to it. The devil, it would seem, is a society that’s sold its soul to the pharmaceutical industry.
SIDE EFFECT MOVIE REVIEWS PROFESSIONAL
Saperstein, Jude Law’s Jonathan Banks, a psychiatrist who tends to her following a suicide attempt and treats her “hopelessness” not with arrogance, but with the professional presumption of knowing what’s good for her, even if it does take a few false starts before he successfully provides her with the relief he no doubt believes that only medical science can provide. But it’s more purposefully in Emily’s relationship to her own Dr. Indeed, Soderbergh winkingly envisions Emily as a modern-day Rosemary Woodhouse, beginning with the film’s svelte opening glide into the apartment building she shares with her husband (Channing Tatum). Even the tinkly electronica of Thomas Newman’s extraordinary score, perversely evocative of the famous lullaby from Rosemary’s Baby, suggests a symptom of Emily’s jangly mental unease. A psychopharmacology thriller about a woman, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara), who fights severe anxiety following her husband’s release from prison for insider trading, and who commits murder after being prescribed a new drug whose side effects include sleepwalking, the film indulgently but justifiably coasts on the groggily antiseptic vibe of Soderbergh’s aesthetic doodling. Even more so than Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s self-professed final film, Side Effects, has reason to resemble a feature-length drug commercial.
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