Movie Review: “Side-Effects,” a Crafty, Shape-Shifting Thriller for Adults

This is the best movie I’ve seen (so far) this year, and even though that isn’t saying much (we’re only six weeks in and this is a notorious dumping ground for most Hollywood movies that would bomb in more competitive time periods) it’s the only one I can really recommend. So basically, I would say that if you want to watch a movie in the first two months of this year, then you should catch this or you can take your chances with sure-to-be-awful Valentine’s movies like Safe Haven.

What Works: An ace cast (Roonie Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Channing Tatum), Jude Law giving his best performance in years, Steven Soderbergh clearly having some fun with such a twisty script, and a story that keeps changing right before your eyes (a thriller, a character drama, a corporate expose), giving you the old bait-and-switch in the best possible way. This is what Flight (the Denzel Washington plane-crash movie that morphed into a quiet drama about addiction with painfully low stakes) wanted to do, but——–in my opinion———didn’t pull off in nearly as satisfying a way. To say much about the plot of Side-Effects is to give away the movie’s chief pleasure, so I’ll just say “see it,” and hopefully you’ll take my word for it.

What Doesn’t Work: Some will feel that the eventual path the movie takes is a lot more conventional than what they set up for us, but I would disagree. I would only say that it’s possible for a movie to work really well as a surface thriller and as a frightening indictment on mood-drugs that you have to work a little harder to see.

What I Would Have Done Differently: This is an intelligent, well-crafted movie for adults in the dead zone of February…I can’t complain. Anything I would do would be so minor it’s not worth giving anyone a reason not to see this movie.