Dinesh Kamath’s column on movie ‘Side Effects’ under the title ‘New movie-releases in Navi Mumbai’ that was published in Newsband

New movie-release in Navi Mumbai

By Dinesh Kamath

Side Effects is a 2013 American psychological thriller film directed by Steven Soderbergh from a screenplay written by Scott Z. Burns. The film stars Jude Law, Rooney Mara, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Channing Tatum. The film concerns the ramifications of an event following a young woman being prescribed antidepressant drugs.

Jude Law gives his best performance since Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, playing Dr Jonathan Banks, an ambitious and fashionable Manhattan psychiatrist who thinks of himself as a decent guy. Dr Banks has a heavy caseload, and is more than ready to consider the blandishments of the pharmaceutical industry, who are prepared to pay him the big bucks to prescribe some of the hi-tech anti-depression drugs they are developing.

The destiny of handsome, compassionate Dr Banks intersects with that of a beautiful and troubled young woman, Emily, played by Rooney Mara. She is someone else who had grown accustomed to the good life, until her investment-banker husband Martin, played by Tatum, was arrested and imprisoned for insider dealing some years ago. Now he is out, and Emily has discovered that her already existing issues with depression have been intensified by the grim reality of making a home with no guarantees about future income – or anything. She is discovering for herself that a working definition of depression is an inability to imagine the future. After a strangely needless car accident, Emily comes under the care of Dr Banks, who suspects that she is trying to hurt herself, and after some false starts with conventional medication, he puts her on the very latest in prescription drugs. Almost at once, Emily becomes happy, excited, well adjusted and sexually fulfilled. But there are side effects – chiefly a disruption to her sleep patterns and a strange new habit of ultra-lucid sleepwalking.