Side Effects
Steven Soderbergh bids farewell to cinema in style – with a gripping psychological thriller about big pharma and mental health that cruelly leaves you craving one last fix.
Because Side Effects is brilliant: a noir psychological thriller – like a 21st-century Marnie, or Rosemary's Baby – that is also an acid satire on big pharma, the mental health profession and its terrifyingly powerful, priestly caste of doctors. There is a compelling lead performance from Rooney Mara who lays down the law with her presence. She demonstrates a potent Hitchcockian combination: an ability to be scared and scary at the same time, and Soderbergh's film manages to introduce its effects in some insidious, almost intravenous way. Fear and fascination swam through my skull simply watching it. And the later scenes involving sex, lies and videotape will be especially involving for those on the lookout for recurrent authorial motifs.
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.
One of the film's most disturbing sequences comes when Martin and Emily attend a smart cocktail party: she, in an attempt to clamp down on the panicky anxiety rising to the surface, absents herself to the bar and sees a distorted reflection of herself in the mirrored wall surface that makes it look as if she has some kind of disfigurement. For an awful moment, that distorted face does not seem any more or less real than the real one.
What a gripping and disturbing thriller this is. Surely it can't be Soderbergh's last movie. Say it ain't so.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário