Side Effects

Side effects are dreadful things. They make you sick, give you headaches, and occasionally lead to retirement. The latter is the worst suffered by this thrilling drama: it will be the last film from its multitasking director, editor and cinematographer, Steven Soderbergh.

He plans to do more painting and, possibly teach. Given his incredibly prolific career, which has averaged a film a year since 1989’s Sex, Lies, And Videotape, he is also the only person since 1938 to be Oscar-nominated for two films in the same year for Best Director (2001) – and the only one to win (for Traffic).

I once tried to give up red meat for Lent. It was a sad failure because it emerged that much of what I was eating as a replacement turned out to be red meat. So while on the one hand I can only hope Mr S has more sense and willpower than I do, Side Effects is such a terrifically enjoyable film that I am willing him to wobble and return to cinema immediately.

Emily Taylor (the otherworldly Rooney Mara) is dealing with both depression and the return of her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) from a four-year spell in prison for insider trading. When she drives her car into a car park in an apparent suicide attempt, the doctor she meets in hospital, Dr Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), makes her start therapy and meds in exchange for not keeping her in.

When none of the drugs she is prescribed seem to work, she asks to try a new, muchadvertised antidepressant, with violent results.

A delicious noir thriller, on the surface Side Effects treats drugs and the people who dance the tango with them. But Scott Z Burns’s script dances around with even more wicked grace, starting with a single shot through an apartment, tracking bloody footprints. And then we’re thrown back three months earlier to see what led to this moment, and whose they are.

Soderbergh reunites three of his recent alumni (Catherine Zeta-Jones, Law and Tatum) so that Side Effects feels familiar without being drowned in nostalgia. Initially, Zeta-Jones is a strange fit as Emily’s therapist from her rich-wife days in Connecticut, Dr Victoria Siebert, but soon settles, and Tatum gets another twisted all-American role. Law, however, is the real pleasure.

Banks is a great character, a well-meaning English doctor who left Britain for America, where mental health is treated more positively. For once, Jude Law gets to show off his skill as the nice guy, albeit one whose willingness to dole out the pills soon brings his neat Manhattan world down around his ears.

Banks’s willingness to consult with the big pharma firms shows that he is just as keen to get rich and keep his family in huge cars and private schooling. Just as his patients aren’t sure what is real or what is the drug, Banks has to start putting in detective work to try and save his name, even as his family and colleagues desert him.

This is such a satisfying, terrifically-plotted film, that to talk about it more would inevitably end up with spoilers. So let’s leave it there – and fervently hope that Soderbergh does not.