There, she is treated by psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who prescribes a wide variety of the usual pharmaceutical suspects — Zoloft, Effexor, Wellbutrin — to control her symptoms. But while she experiences many of the common side effects (sleepwalking, altered sex drive), none of these medications help her. Banks consults Emily's former therapist, Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), and she suggests trying a new drug on the market called Ablixa (not to be confused with the antidepressants Abilify or Celexa).
It is at this point that the story takes its big unanticipated twist, though viewers who recognize the source of the film's opening shot may guess what's coming. Suffice it to say, Emily's use of Ablixa has unanticipated side effects not only for her but for Martin and Banks, and the story becomes a puzzle in which nothing is quite as it seems. In other words, if you want to see this movie and know someone who loves to blurt out spoilers, stay away from them until you have seen it for yourself.
The early scenes of "Side Effects" are fairly spellbinding as Soderbergh quietly but effectively puts viewers into the anxious, jagged mindset off someone who feels out of sync with the world around her and helpless to do anything about it. At the same time, he and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (who previously collaborated on "The Informant!," and "Contagion") offer a cuttingly satirical glimpse at an overmedicated world in which doctors serve as paid mouthpieces for pharmaceutical companies and everyone has a recommendation for some pill or another that will presumably smooth over pesky traces of everyday existence.
This stuff is all great but it all gets shoved to the side once the focus of the story shifts. Without going into too much detail, it's as though Burns took all the melodramatic plot developments he smartly left out of his screenplay for "Contagion" (another film with a dim view of the pharmaceutical industry) and stuffed them into "Side Effects" instead. The initially fascinating characters soon find themselves prisoners of a narrative that gets more unlikely with each passing scene until the movie devolves into something virtually indistinguishable from a episode of one of the lesser "Law & Order" spinoffs.
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