Side effects

Year of release : 2013

Run time : 1h46m

Genre : Thriller / Crime

Cast : Rooney Mara, Jude Law, Catherine Zeta Jones, Channing Tatum, Vinessa Shaw

Director : Steven Soderbergh

Emily’s husband has been in prison for 4 years for insider trading. She’s been visiting him in prison all these years, and now he’s finally being released. She has a good relationship with him and his mother, which is rare.

When he is finally back, instead of being happy, she’s sad. One day she drives the car into the parking lot wall.

At the hospital she meets psychiatrist Jonathan Banks, who wants to keep her in the hospital for a few days, but she says her husband just came home from prison, and she can’t be in the hospital.

He tells her apart from having head trauma, it’s obvious she is suicidal, and he can’t let her go. She insists on him just giving her pills, and becoming her psychiatrist, and tells him she’s been to another psychiatrist 4 years before, giving him the name of her former doctor.

Jonathan gives her pills and talks to her former psychiatrist, who tells him about a new anti depressant, Ablixa.

Emily starts seeing Jonathan at his offices for her condition. She tells him about how she met her husband, when she was 23, getting married very fast.

Jonathan seems to really love his job and to want to help people. His career is also on the rise, as he gets a new job, a study trial for Ablixa pills. This is good, as his wife lost her job, and it’s hard to get a new one.

Emily goes to a party with her husband, and gets sad, having to be taken home. The next day she gets too close to the tracks at the subway, when the train is coming in. Right after, she goes to Jonathan while he’s having lunch with his wife, and asks him to have a session with her for she feels like when she drove into the wall. Jonathan goes with her to a hotel lounge or something, where she talks about what’s happening to her, and she shows him what she bought to wear when she’s with her husband (this is important later in the movie).

Jonathan puts Emily on Ablixa, and she seems to be fine.Just that she starts to sleep walk. She tells the doctor about it, and he wants to take her off the pills, but she says she’ll have to see another doctor if he does, so he gives her something for the sleepwalking, keeping her on Ablixa.

Emily still sleepwalks, and one of those times, when she’s cooking, and her husband, who just got a job, comes home, she stabs him. She goes back to bed, and when she wakes up, she calls the police.

She is arrested, and the police ask Jonathan to work with them or his career is on the line, but he refuses, taking her side. The police say someone has to go to prison, either him, for giving her such pills, or her, for k1lling her husband.

I personally enjoyed the movie. It’s a good movie which makes you wonder about what’s going on. Did she do it on purpose, or was she really out of it? She seemed to have had a perfect relationship with her husband, his mother..

When she gets away with it, only having to stay in the mental hospital, you see her changing her behavior (asking why does she have to go, because she’s not crazy), breaking character, considering she k1lled the man she supposedly loved, so maybe, there’s more to it.

What she did also has consequences on Jonathan, who loses his job, his job for the pills company, and even his marriage, as the pictures from when he talked to Emily when she came to see him when he was with his wife and showed him the gift, adding some more with her on the bed with the same gift, were sent to his wife, when he refuses to sign the release papers for Emily to get out of the mental institution. Jonathan starts to suspect she used him, taking him for a fool because she wanted to k1ll her husband, and probably someone else is in on it. But why?

SPOILERS The reasons why she did it are just stupid! Her husband seemed nice and to really have loved her, his mother too! END OF SPOILERS

They keep on saying the lead is attractive, but I don’t find her beautiful at all!

The actors were good.

The soundtrack was good.

The movie received positive reviews from the critics and audiences of Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. Cinema Score audiences graded it a B.

The movie grossed almost 67 million dollars at the box office, against a budget of 30 million dollars.

Viewer discretion is advised as the movie contains nudity.

You can watch the full movie for free, on the Ok.Ru platform, in English, with Arabic translations, or dubbed in Russian or Spanish.

Rating : Worth a watch !