Side Effects

"3.5 stars out of 4"

Yaaay! Finally! A review on a new movie! We went to see this movie last night and let me just tell you that it exceeded my expectations! Although I was expecting a good movie but I didn’t see this coming!

This must be the most unbiased review I’ve written so far. Because it’s a brand new movie so there hasn’t been any award shows to include this movie and I have resisted really hard on reading the critics’ reviews and I haven’t heard anything about this movie. I just saw its trailer on IMDb and it seemed so fascinating that I said to myself I have to see this movie...and kept bugging everyone to go see it with me until they did! (By the way, a Soderbergh movie with Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jude Law in it…it’s a must see regardless of the trailer!) So, here we go!

The movie starts with a scene showing blood on the floor and flashes back to 3 months earlier. Emily is a 28 year old woman whose husband of five years, Martin, has been in prison for 4 years for insider trading. He is about to be released but she seems to be having a severe depression, coping with all the things that have happened in her life, “rug being pulled out of her feet”, as she describes it. 

She looks fragile (and actually looks like the young Kristin Scott Thomas!) and after a suicide attempt starts seeing a psychiatrist, Dr Banks (played by Jude Law), who prescribes her antidepressants that don’t seem to be working. He talks to her previous shrink who is played by Catherine Zeta-Jones and she tells him that there is this new drug called Alixa that seems to be working. Everywhere Emily goes, she as well hears about this new drug. So, she starts using this drug and it seems to be working, except there is a small problem. That’s right, it has a side effect! She starts sleep walking and does strange things while she’s sleep that she doesn’t remember when waking up. Martin asks the doctor to take her off the meds and Dr Banks seems to agree, since he doesn’t know that much about this new drug, but she insists on continuing to take them on the grounds that nothing else has helped her before. 

One day while sleep walking again, she kills someone. When a detective talks to him, she says hysterically that she doesn’t remember anything, but the detective sees that marks of blood on her feet and arrests her for suspicion of murder. She goes on trial but since everyone testifies that she was depressed and on meds with side effects, she is sent to a mental hospital instead of jail. Some fingers are pointed at her shrink since he’s the one who has prescribed the meds and he’s in a moral dilemma for who should get punished.

He has a wife who’s recently lost her job and has a son in a private school, so he tries everything he can to keep his job, but after the revelation of a past accusation of sexual assault on his account and surfacing of pictures taken of him with Emily that suggests he might have had an affair with her, his wife leaves him, his name gets stained and he loses his practice. He starts seeing some clues on the case that don't seem to be right. Now he should solve the mystery of this drug to win back his life.

The first half of the movie has a slow rhythm, but the second half…wow! Suddenly, with a simple bluff from Dr Banks, the movie takes a whole other turn. It got more and more interesting as it moved on. And more and more unpredictable (the way I like movies to be!). With the first surprise of the film, I was like, okaaay, it’s one of those movies! Nothing we haven’t seen before! A 3 star movie since it doesn’t have any new element to offer, but boy did it! Right to the end of movie you couldn’t see what was coming. I changed my mind and said definitely a 3.5! I didn’t care for the ending scene that much...not the ending itself of course…the ending itself was a surprise! It kept you at the edge of your seat right up to the end. Definitely compensated for the first slow half! Right when you thought that everything was over, there would be a new turn in the plot that you didn’t see coming.

Although I didn't get some parts...like how he was able to go see her in the hospital she was being kept and still be her doctor after all this scandal, and even decide on who she is allowed to visit. But maybe it is possible. I don't know!

Very good job on the actors’ part. Rooney Mara wasn’t as good as Dragon Tattoo, but she has a very bright future ahead of her. Have to wait and see what she will do next. The range of the movies that she’s played in so far is really remarkable.

I would definitely recommend you seeing it. One of the reasons is that I saw this movie with one of my friends who’s not a big film buff and there aren’t that many movies that would make her say WOW at the end…but this movie was one of them! So, I am sure all movie lovers and those who like seeing a good movie in general would enjoy watching “side-effects”.

In one word: entertaining.