Side Effects (2013)

Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects arrives dressed as a film about the pharmaceutical industry, which is the sort of subject that tends to invite a certain earnestness. The film has other plans. It is a Hitchcockian contraption, a machine of misdirection, and its interest in antidepressants, insider trading, and the machinery of psychiatric diagnosis is largely structural. Big pharma is the set dressing. The suspense is the point. We watch Rooney Mara's Emily drift through a fog of prescriptions, and the film watches us watching, waiting for the moment we decide she is a victim.

The most conspicuous gesture toward contemporary sensibilities is the late revelation that Emily and her psychiatrist Victoria were lovers, a detail that drives the entire conspiracy. It is a genuine plot hinge, not a decorative flourish, and the film treats it with the same cold efficiency it applies to everything else. Both women are architects of a murder, which complicates any reading of the film as a statement about women's agency. Soderbergh is not making an argument. He is making a puzzle, and the pieces happen to include a lesbian affair and a pair of scheming women. The result is ambiguity, not advocacy.

Where the film comes closest to sermonizing is in its treatment of mental illness, and even there it retreats. Depression, sleepwalking, and the seductions of experimental medication are central, but the disorders are mostly counterfeit, a con dressed in clinical language. That leaves the film with little to advocate and less to lecture about. The cast is white, the concerns narrower than the marketing implied, and the moral universe confined to a well-appointed apartment in Manhattan. We are left with craft, and craft, in this case, is enough.