Side Effects Hollywood movie and rating

Side Effects is a psychological thriller film directed by Steven Soderbergh from a screenplay written by Scott Z. Burns. The film concerns the ramifications of an event following a young woman being prescribed antidepressant drugs.

Side Effects was released in the United States on February 8, 2013.


Plot:

Emily Taylor's (Rooney Mara), husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just been released after serving a 4-year prison sentence for insider trading. Shortly afterward Emily, as if in a trance, drives her car into a concrete wall in an apparent suicide attempt. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) is a psychiatrist assigned by the state to her case and while he fears for her safety, he agrees to release her from the hospital as long as she frequently attends sessions wit
h him. Emily tries a series of anti-depressant medications but they fail to work. Jonathan then talks to Emily's previous psychiatrist Victoria (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whom Emily stopped seeing after she lost her health insurance; Victoria suggests that Jonathan put Emily on the drug Ablixa. Jonathan hesitates putting Emily on the experimental drug until she attempts suicide a second time by almost jumping onto a subway track before a policeman stops her. The medication works and Emily seems to regain her normal life with Martin, except that she begins to have severe sleepwalking episodes. Jonathan monitors her and her case appears to be solved until one night she stabs Martin to death while sleep-walking.

Emily is brought to trial after a thorough investigation. It is revealed that Ablixa is known to have sleep-walking side-effects in patients, and Jonathan fights for Emily's innocence. Jonathan is criticized publicly for fumbling Emily's case and is accused of taking too large of a work load and consulting for drug trials because his wife had recently lost her job and he was unwilling to remove her son from an expensive private school. Emily eventually agrees to an insanity plea deal; she'll be declared not guilty as long as she is held in a mental institution until cleared by a psychiatrist.

Due to the bad publicity of the case, Jonathan's partners leave him, he is removed from the clinical trials, and the District Attorney will no longer consult with him. As he cannot believe he did anything wrong, he begins to investigate the case, looking for any angle to prove he did nothing wrong -- even conspiracies -- and he begins to find bizarre circumstances in the case. For example, Emily had clearly activated her car's safety mechanisms just before her first suicide attempt, Victoria had been the only psychiatrist that reported the sleep-walking side effects of Ablixa, and the coverage from Emily's murder trial had caused a massive drop in the stock price of Ablixa and a large rise in the stock price of its primary competitor. Jonathan believes that Emily and Victoria have conspired together and he interviews Emily after administering what he claims is a truth serum. Emily behaves as if she's groggy from the drug -- which unbeknownst to her was actually a placebo -- and this confirms Jonathan's suspicions.

When Jonathan confronts Victoria with this information, she mails photographs to Jonathan's wife implying he had an affair with Emily; Jonathan's wife and son leave him. Jonathan manages to turn Emily and Victoria against each other by using legal means to prevent contact between them, then lies to them, making each believe that her partner had sold her out to Jonathan for a better deal. Desperate for Jonathan to save her, Emily reveals the workings of the plot to him: Emily enjoyed the rich life and hated Martin for causing her to lose it. She specifically went to Victoria for counseling as she, too, had been abandoned by her husband, and the two began a relationship. They taught each other about the workings of the financial world and faking psychiatric disorders. They then went to elaborate means to fake the side effects of the drug in order to manipulate the stock prices of Ablixa's manufacturer and its competitor, allowing the duo to become rich through the change in stock prices and so on...

Cast:

    Jude Law as Dr. Jonathan Banks
    Rooney Mara as Emily Taylor
    Catherine Zeta-Jones as Dr. Victoria Siebert
    Channing Tatum as Martin Taylor
    Vinessa Shaw[5] as Dierdre Banks
    Polly Draper as Emily's boss
    David Costabile as Carl Millbank

Rating :    IMDB: 7.6/10, Rotten Tomato: 7.4/5

Below are some of the images of the movie. Click any image to see the slide show(Lightbox) of all the images:
Image source: Google images