When Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) is admitted to ambitious psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law) after a suicide attempt, he does everything he can to help his new patient. Emily's husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just been released from prison after serving several years for insider trading. But their attempt to start a new life together after the long, painful separation fails: Drugged up, Emily kills her husband, but can't remember anything the next morning. Now it's up to Dr. Banks to prove that his patient didn't know what she was doing because of the drugs she was taking... “After the film begins like a slasher version of 'Desperate Housewives', the middle section offers a sarcastic portrait of a drug-addicted middle-class society in which frustrated wives, depressed lovers and career women plagued by burnout juggle many, many pills, and doctors earn extra money as lobbyists for pharmaceutical companies. In the late capitalist context of performance stress, efficiency thinking and self-optimization, drugs, the film suggests with a biting undertone, have their fixed social function; their consumption has long since become the standard behaviour of modernity: 'They don't change you. They just make it easier to be yourself,' it says at one significant point. [...] One can understand 'Side Effects' as a blueprint for a modernity that is made up of voyeurism and lies, voyeurism, shying away from the truth and self-manipulation. As in his amoral 'Ocean's' films, such as the wish machine melo 'Solaris' (2002), the neoliberal 'The Informant! (2009) or his most romantic film 'Out of Sight' (1998), the moralistic pathos of truth evaporates. Once again, Soderbergh succeeds in doing many things differently from his colleagues and astounding the audience with his self-confident, original and very free approach to narrative and genre rules.” (Rüdiger Suchsland, on: filmdienst.de)