Soderbergh’s pharmaceutical thriller is a fine, sickly portrait of depression for an hour and a well-oiled potboiler after that. The machinery is cleanly built and Rooney Mara is remarkable, but the film ends up caring less about pills than it began by suggesting.
Steven Soderbergh announced Side Effects as his last film for cinemas, then shot and cut it himself. It was not his last film, but it has the feel of a man clearing his desk: a brisk 106 minutes from a script by Scott Z. Burns, who wrote Contagion for him, about a depressed young woman, her psychiatrist and the pill that comes between them. It is good. For an hour it is better than good, and the rest of this review is about the difference.
The first shot drifts through a window into a flat and finds blood on the floor; a caption then takes us back three months. Rooney Mara plays Emily Taylor as a woman who has run out of energy for her own face. She stands at a party holding a drink she is not drinking, and when she puts her foot down in the car park she does not look frightened, only tired. Soderbergh, behind his own camera, gives New York the light of a hospital corridor, greenish and flat and a little dim at noon, with the focus so shallow that anyone not speaking blurs into the wall. We did not enjoy that hour and we mean that as praise: Mara’s blank face under that light got at us in a way thrillers seldom bother to.
Jude Law’s Jonathan Banks is a decent, slightly vain doctor with a full list, a wife (Vinessa Shaw) worried about money, and a fee from a drug company for putting his patients on a trial. Law plays him as a man who believes he is one of the good ones and has never had cause to check. Howard Cummings gives him an office of pale wood and glass where nothing bad could happen. Susan Lyall puts Emily in grey knitwear a size too big and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Dr Siebert in black, hair pulled back, glasses she takes off to make a point. Thomas Newman’s score is a low electronic hum, kept so quiet you notice it mostly when it stops.
Then, at the close of the first act, something happens in the Taylors’ flat that we will not describe, and the film changes what it is about. Until then it has been a film about a sick woman, her medication and the people who profit from it. Afterwards it is about who did what to whom, and the medication becomes a device. Burns builds the switch well: the reversals arrive on schedule, each set up in plain sight, and Soderbergh the editor never holds a shot a beat too long to warn us a clue is passing. As a machine it is close to faultless. As a follow-through on that first hour it is a let-down, because the questions about pills are dropped.
The performances hold up better than the plot does. Mara has to play more than one version of Emily and makes each one true while it is on screen, which is the reason the last stretch works at all. Law frays well: the tie goes, the beard comes in, the voice rises. Zeta-Jones has less to do than her billing suggests and does it with a straight face the script does not always earn. Channing Tatum is quietly good in a part that gives him little to push against. We laughed once, late on, at a line we are fairly sure was not written as a joke.
Soderbergh has made this sort of film before and made it better. Contagion (2011), also written by Burns, followed a disease through the institutions meant to stop it and never once cut to a twist. Most of the reviews so far reach for Hitchcock, and it is fair as far as it goes: the cool surfaces, the compromised professional, the wife who begins to wonder. But Hitchcock did not open with an hour of honest misery and then ask us to reread it as a clue.
It runs 106 minutes and carries a 15, and it wastes none of them. See it for Mara, and for a director in full control of a film slightly smaller than the one he began. Watch it with someone who knows nothing about it, and mind what you say when the lights come up.
