Side Effects

Director: Steven Soderbergh, Main Cast: Rooney MaraChanning TatumJude LawCatherine Zeta-Jones

A young woman (Mara) falls back into depression after her husband (Tatum) comes out of jail after a 4 year stint for inside trading. She seeks help after an attempt suicide, starts seeing regularly a psychiatrist (Law) and taking medication. Things do not improve until she tries a brand new anti-depressant and begins to flourish. Up to this point the film seems a story about monsters from the id and how to deal with them, well, not really because the plot thickens when Mara’s character kills her husband (Tatum dead so early in the movie is a treat!) while she’s sleepwalking…a side effect of her medication. The focus of the tale moves to the psychiatrist and the unraveling of his life; he desperately tries to understand what happened  and uncover a very cunning scheme. Soderbergh’s moral is: greed is what moves the world. The cinematography and the lights are effective to set the mood and the cast is quite convincing but not enough to really sell the story. It felt disconnected, which maybe was the whole point. —6/10

2 Comments

Filed under Seen at home

2 responses to “Side Effects

  1. Amy K.

    Just 6/10, eh? I guess I liked this movie much more than you did! Though to be fair, I saw it on an airplane, which is usually enough to bump a movie up one or two points. I didn’t end up feeling like it was disconnected though, so maybe that’s what left us feeling differently about it.

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