Steven Soderbergh is known for his two pronged approach to directing,his swift swapping between charming crowd-pleasers and alienating art-house pictures; its a process that has gotten him a pretty great career but I would argue that era is now over. The man has been promising his retirement for years, since six odd films back and looking back I’m starting to believe that he meant it, that the Soderbergh we knew stopped making movies back when he said he would. Ever since, let’s say The Informant, he has taken a new tact to film-making which is to take the skeleton of a crowd-pleaser, cut it apart and through some twisted crypto-taxidermy logical process reform it into something with an indie spirit.

Haywire was an all-star action blockbuster that would really only appeal to fans of ballet and pure physical motion; Contagion was a disaster movie without special effects, where society died a slow, truly scary death and Magic Mike was a movie sold on the tagline of “Channing Tatum takes of his shirt!” And yet it tackled real life social strife in more honest a manner than any Sundance movie of the same year. So although this film, Side Effects, is advertised as a slick thriller starring a cast of charming, chiseled young actors I knew that nothing would be quite as I expected. Still, I didn’t expect at all for the film to be this.

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