Soderbergh: Side Effects (2013)

The last film in Steven Soderbergh's retirement trilogy, following Magic Mike and Haywire, Side Effects has been noted as a minor, if entertaining, work to go out on. However, Soderbergh has always been a self-consciously minor auteur: if he has a directorial signature, it consists in always embracing the informational excess of the screen at the precise moment at which he finds it. In Side Effects, that excess is more mysterious than ever before, as Soderbergh crafts a slippery, elusive narrative around a stockbroker (Channing Tatum), his wife (Rooney Mara), her two psychiatrists (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jude Law) and a crime committed while sleepwalking under the influence of medication. That begs the question – what does it mean to have intentions, or to be conscious, while experiencing acute parasomnia? And, for the most part, Soderbergh’s answer is affective, or experiential, as he suffuses the film with a studied sombience that divorces action from intentionality: awareness, for these characters, is not necessarily awareness of anything. Instead, we’re presented with a free-floating awareness that’s not unlike Hitchcock’s free-floating thought patterns, producing an odd, perceptual claustrophobia – all the spaces in the film feel more constrained than they actually are, just because of the way that Soderbergh limits how much we can be aware of them. In fact, virtually everything about the film seems curiously unregistered, unprocessed - or already processed by something that exceeds human perception – to the point where watching it is like being heavily medicated, not only experiencing medicine acting through you, but medicine actually perceiving through you, putting you to sleep to perceive through you. Perhaps that’s why the whole film feels so warm: Soderbergh is always adept at capturing the pulse of information overload, but here it's positively circadian, conflating shooting and sheeting, turning the whole world into a pair of sheets. And it’s this attention to “material non-public information” that migrates the film into an insider trading drama, as the market itself becomes something that can only be apprehended in a heightened state of sleep-watching. Certainly, there is a more conventional, discernible return to intention towards the end – not unlike the devolution of some David Mamet thrillers – but, to Soderbergh’s credit, some ambiguity still lingers, some information remains both material and non-public: if the film emerges from the deepest recesses of sleep, it still never quite wakes up.