Director Steven Soderbergh's retirement from cinema after a career of 30-plus years has been much ballyhooed, and is hopefully only temporary. But if "Side Effects" turns out to be his last movie, it's a shame, because this one shows him at the top of his game. Soderbergh is working again with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, and if their previous collaboration "Contagion" suffered from being a bit too sprawling, they certainly learned from the experience: "Side Effects" is a tightly constructed gem.
Rooney Mara ("The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo") plays Emily, a troubled woman whose husband Martin (Channing Tatum, "Magic Mike") is just getting out of jail after time served for insider trading on Wall Street. Martin is convinced he can put things back on track, but Emily seems to be collapsing from the stress. A failed suicide attempt lands her in the care of Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who takes more than a passing interest in his attractive young patient. After consulting with her former shrink, Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), he puts Emily on a smorgasbord of meds, one of which has the side effect of giving her blackouts, which leads to a tragic accident.
This was one of those collective gasp-out-loud moments in the cinema, and all plot description will end here. (And seriously, don't even read the synopsis on IMDb.com, which contains a massive spoiler.) What Soderbergh achieves remarkably well with "Side Effects" is something only rarely glimpsed since Alfred Hitchcock's classic "Psycho": a story which pulls you in for a couple of reels looking like one type of movie, only to break that flow and veer off in an entirely unexpected direction.