Movie review: One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small

Steven Soderbergh’s last film takes on scary experimentation with new but needed drugs.

If Side Effects played in Pakistani cinemas it would only have the effect of reinforcing our popular dread of anti-depressants. Emily Taylor’s (Rooney Mara) husband (Channing Tatum) is about to be released from jail after serving a sentence for insider trading. A day or so after his release she attempts suicide by ramming her car into a wall. In the ER she is introduced to Dr Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) and agrees to go into treatment for depression.

She asks to be put on a new drug whose side effect is sleepwalking. As expected, and we are on the edge of our seats even though we know what is coming: the medication has disastrous consequences. Dr Banks is blamed and Emily ends up in jail.

This was the preamble to a film that is divided into two distinct parts. Up until the medication leads to disaster we cannot help but feel nerve-wracking suspense at every camera pan. But in the second half of the movie, the treatment of the film feels disjointed. The suspense disappears and we just see Dr Banks fumble through a series of discoveries about the drug as he seeks to clear his name. Still, the kicker in the end is satisfying.



The star of this work, however, is Rooney Mara’s performance as a vacant-faced patient who we can’t quite trust. The triumph of her acting is the ability to imperceptibly alter her expressions as the ‘depression’ progresses. Don’t bother registering Channing Tatum as he does little more than fill in for the supporting actor. A smaller and perhaps undervalued appearance is made by the eerie Catherine Zeta-Jones as Dr Victoria Siebert, Emily’s former psychiatrist. But as Dr Banks must discover, that spate of treatment entailed more than prescription writing. We’ve seen Jude Law in stronger roles but he manages to do justice to the prominent psychiatrist who falls from grace.



Side Effects was in the top 10 on the US box office for a few weeks. It is a shame that its director, Steven Soderbergh, who brought us We Need to Talk About Kevin, is giving up film to move into TV. But it seems that his fascination with the human physiology and psychology continues with his new series The Knick about a hospital during 1900 when antibiotics were being discovered amid high death rates.

Three films that made us understand the madness

1. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Milos Forman



The director who brought us Amadeus created this classic from the novel in 1975. Jack Nicholson is sent to a mental asylum where he wreaks havoc and challenges the system. Bittersweet and terribly funny. One of the best films on psychiatry.

2. Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis



This 1995 film won an Oscar for its treatment of alcoholism and won accolades for Elisabeth Shue and Nicholas Cage, a prostitute and a washed up Hollywood screenwriter who fall in love even as he insists on drinking himself to death. Haunting soundtrack includes work from Sting.

3.  Interiors by Woody Allen



If you’ve been depressed or known anyone with depression don’t watch this incisive non-funny Allen work. After her husband divorces her, a woman finds she cannot function. Her children are in their 30s and struggle to help her. A brilliant and painful portrait of the debilitating condition.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, June 2^nd, 2013.

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