How does side effects the movie end

Burns went to Bellevue Hospital to meet Sasha Bardey, a forensic psychiatrist who worked with mentally ill patients, some of whom had been sent from Rikers Island jail. Bardey had offered his services as an adviser for a show Burns was working on called Wonderland, which depicted life in a psychiatric institution.

His return, while welcome, brings on a wave of depression and self-harm attempts that her psychiatrist Dr. Banks treats with the fictional drug Ablixa. There is a subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, message within the film that psychiatry is ultimately a business, and even the most well-meaning practitioners still have to eat. In one telling scene, Dr. Banks is confronted by his partners about a patient who has been arrested for an incident related to her medication that could have fallout both for Banks and the firm.

But then it scraps it all in a mid-film twist that complicates and deepens things on a level that makes me actually realise, for the first time in my life, what it must have been like to see Psycho when it was new, minus the transgressive violence. It's hard to say exactly what Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns working with the director for the third time were up to with this shift, because there are many possibilities, most of them to do with forcing us, in the audience, to confront what it is that we expect from our movies, why we make certain connections with certain characters, and how a savvy filmmaker can used that against us - Side Effects does not tell one single lie, though it surely does feel that way after a little while.

At a certain level, all of this is just in service of making one hell of a thriller, in which double-crosses fly by madly, in which the protagonist races ahead of us and we have to catch up only to find that all along, we actually knew just as much about the plot, only we weren't being encouraged to make the same wild but successful guesses. The third act, a chain of subterfuges that none of the principals seem to grasp fully, is constructed by the characters in such a blind way that it resembles those poker variants where you have to bet on cards that you aren't permitted to see.

I mean this to be a compliment, incidentally; nothing serves to make a tense situation in a movie even tenser by demonstrating to the audience's satisfaction that not even the people onscreen have any idea what's going on. But after Haywire , I don't want to accuse Soderbergh of making a simple thriller, even if it's a crackling one, and so we return to the question of why he and Burns so thoroughly trick us and rewrite the rules of their movie completely at the midpoint.

All without actually changing the texture of the movie at all. Soderbergh manages to make largely the same aesthetic choices function differently: instead of close-ups emphasising the suffocating feeling of depression, they're close-ups that push us right up into the face of a mind in anti-rational freefall, for example. Thomas Newman's extraordinary score, an unclassifiable blend of bass-heavy menace and jangling that sounds like modernist wind chimes, holds the whole thing together steadily; the film's heightened sound design, similar to the exaggerated sound effects in Haywire but now stressing the noises of offices and apartments rather than fistfights, is used both to heighten disaffection and paranoia, as needed.

All of which is mechanically flawless, and all of which still doesn't answer the question of what the movie is up to with that abrupt shift, or the twist within the shift, or with its surprisingly forthright endorsement of an unpleasantly musty old misogyny straight out of a s film noir.

Hell, maybe that's even part of the trick: use year-old generic tropes in a fresh new body, just to see what happens. Not that Side Effects is any kind of noir , but it has their corrupt, nasty soul: every one of the main figures in the film turns out to be pretty unlikable, all of them on their own little power trip in some way or another, and it's simply a great misfortune that the shape this ends up taking is so unconcerned with rather problematic gender overtones.

I can only come back to my initial thought, which is that at a certain point, Side Effects is turning on us, the audience, and very rudely asking a question that nice commercial pictures don't ask: what is our stake in these characters and this plot, and how do we feel about what is done to it?

Psychoanalyzing our response to the movie, basically, which isn't out of bounds for a movie about psychiatric medicine, and is well in keeping with a filmmaking career that has, for years now, been obsessed with using the audience against itself. Whatever the case, it's bold and aggressive and completely sure of itself, possessed with a singularity of vision and a fantastic level of craftsmanship to make sure that vision is put across, and I do not like to think that we shall not see the like of it again anytime soon, even when the results are this purposefully inconclusive.

Categories: domestic dramas , fun with structure , steven soderbergh , thrillers. Hercules: Zero to Hero. Later in the film, when the stabbing is depicted, Emily walks toward the bed leaving no footprints, and the camera shows a clear shot of her feet which have no blood on them. Quotes Dr. User reviews Review. Top review. Side Effects cured medical thrillers with a blood pumping syringe. Forget about 'Contagion' which was entirely mediocre anyway and even put aside 'Flatliners', trust in Steven Soderbergh to get the job done right on his second attempt An entirely gripping, captivating and twisted plot that might just be his career best.

A young woman, who's husband has just been released from prison, is prescribed a drug to cure her depression, but with unexpected side effects.

Since its release, this has always been in the top echelon of thrillers in my opinion. Sure, the narrative slowly becomes convoluted and frequently drifts away from the prescription drug problem that it illustrates. However, it never fails to hypnotise me. A provocatively shot underrated gem that deftly balances its jeopardising characters that strangely feel both likeable and despised simultaneously.

The screenplay is confidently written to make you doubt yourself, you think you've got one character sussed only for the story to then take a sharp turn in the opposite direction. It's almost Hitchcock-like, which to me is an admirable inspiration and one most thrillers should take notes from. Jude Law and Rooney Mara must be praised for their natural ability to entrance me.

Much like medicine, I became dependant on them at delivering the story and they did so with ease. Newman's composition suited the clinical environment and surprisingly had me on edge even more.

Soderbergh's direction and cinematography was sumptuous, loved how the background and foreground were always blurred and only the character speaking was in focus. A fantastic method to engage the viewer and ensure they are paying attention.

Safe to say his experience paid off dearly. As I said, the plot does become slightly convoluted during the third act and plot holes do crop up occasionally.

Yet, it's very rare for a thriller to consistently keep me engaged and for that I have to applaud Side Effects. A film that I will frequently revisit on an annual basis. TheMovieDiorama Mar 1, FAQ 1. Details Edit. Release date February 8, United States. United States. Official Facebook Official site. English French. The Bitter Pill.