SIDE EFFECTS (Steven Soderbergh, 2013)

-

Martin Taylor (Channing Tatum) is finally released after serving four years' time for insider trading. He goes home to his wife Emily (Rooney Mara), a now distant, depressed and suicidal woman. After Emily intently drives her car against a wall, a psychiatrist- Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) is assigned to her care. Banks fears for her safety, and he should because for the entirety of the movie, Emily is a walking time bomb. Mara perfectly captures the psychological state of an unstable woman, and writer Scott Z. Burns and director Steven Soderbergh takes us on an uncertain ride filled with double twists and role reversals. 

The shit hits the fan when Banks allows Emily to take a new prescription drug called Ablixa to cure depression, after a recommendation by Emily's former psychiatrist Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones). The depression is cured, and Emily finally recovers her sex drive, but the pill has many dangerous side effects.

By the first half of the movie, Soderbergh throws in a huge plot surprise, setting things in motion. Suddenly, the dramatic mood of the film becomes a high stakes Hitchcockian thriller. 

Aside from the meaty plot that although talkative, is never boring, fantastic to observe as well is the cinematography, which is also done by Soderbergh (under the name Peter Andrews). At most times, his camera takes on the voyeur approach, making us watchful accomplices, or witnesses if you will, themes he so greatly discussed in SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE and THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE. 

At many uncountable times, we are questioning Emily's guilt/innocence. Soderbergh and Burns masterfully layers the storytelling with enough events for us to doubt our prejudice with Emily, and about who really is the accountable one. On a side note, the film also hovers around the idea of medical malpractice. 

The resolution was somewhat expected, and while I may have enjoyed the satisfaction of retribution and the buildup of events leading to the finale, I fear that the exposition of the finale and the way things ended was somewhat used already somewhere before. An open-ended ending may have been great as well, but what the hell, we knew we demanded this closure after two hours of witch hunting.  

RATING: 4/5



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ANINO SA LIKOD NG BUWAN (Jun Lana, 2015)

-
Image
* English title "Shadow behind the Moon" The best term to describe Jun Lana's latest film would be a cinematic charade- a game of identities, of motives, of suppressed passions, and of uncertainty. Or the film equivalent of a Russian doll, if you will. "Anino sa Likod ng Buwan" only has three characters- husband and wife Nando (Anthony Falcon) and Emma (LJ Reyes) and military man Joel (Luis Alandy). What started as a seemingly routine banter among friends gradually and intensely escalated into an examination of society, where the definition of immorality is blurred during a time of insurgency.  And in fact, the film does discuss the subject of immorality from various paradigms. When does adultery become acceptable, and to whom? Is sexual liberation more heinous than murder? Why is immorality always a double standard? The film plays out the ideas in endless games. Or are they really games at all? Lana could have stopped there, but he didn...
Read more

TUHOG (Jeffrey Jeturian)

-
Image
Film within a film-structured movies are always interesting watch. Not only do they provide a much-needed deconstruction of form and content of cinema itself, but also that much-needed emotional punch a cinephile would surely love.  Like in BAD EDUCATION (Almodovar, 2004), we witness the characters tell the back story via montage, as if we are part of the cast of characters watching an actual movie. The form was successful in evoking pain and regret, and also of empathy. In TUHOG, Jeffrey Jeturian and screenwriter Bing Lao tackles sensational media in the Philippines, especially in cinema. The film opens as a film producer hears a pitch for a possible movie- a story of a grandfather who rapes his own granddaughter.  The director of the film soon after visits the victim of the crime, Floring (Ina Raymundo). Coercing both she and her mother, Perla (Irma Adlawan) to sell them the movie rights to their story, we witness as exploitation cinema unfolds. To think of it, capitaliz...
Read more

BIGKIS (Neal Tan, 2014)

-
Image
As an advocacy film, BIGKIS (INTERTWINED) gets its message across. The state of maternal healthcare in the Philippines is downright depressing, with mothers seated on the floor of public hospitals due to shortage of beds, medical equipment and hospital staff. The baby better be gaping through the birth canal before the mother receives serious medical attention.  Such social issue has been featured countless times in local documentaries and even in a feature film (2011's BAHAY BATA), but BIGKIS pushes the envelope further by bridging a connection between mother and child by means of breastfeeding, and in doing so, promoting breastfeeding in the process.  As a drama, the film tends to squeeze too much tragedy from the downtrodden lives of its characters that a lot of the dialogue feels staged for us to feel sorry for their countless miseries. Mariel (LJ Reyes), a teenage mother deals with an unwanted pregnancy and worse, the abandonment of her baby's father (Pancho ...
Read more