The eerie trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s star–studded psychological thriller, “Side Effects,” hit the web on Friday with the morbidly cheesy tagline, “In Some Instances, Death May Occur.”
What We Love: This manic trailer is cryptic but enthralling, painting a dark and sensuous world where nice young women start popping prescription pills to manage anxiety, wake up next to dead bodies and have to start asking themselves the hard questions. The trailer, like its characters, seems to dance on the edge of a nervous breakdown, flickering with paranoia, scandal and lots of drugs—a potent cocktail for a psychological thriller. Side Effects delivers a killer cast that teams Academy Award winners and nominees, Catherine Zeta Jones, Jude Law and Rooney Mara with the ever–dapper Magic Mike. Rooney, the iconic girl with the dragon tattoo, is no stranger to unstable heroines, and looks to make a dynamic Black Swan.
What We Don’t: The trailer teeters at times on increasingly common psycho–erotic clichés of emotionally vacant and stressed out–heroines turned sexed up murderesses. And when we strip the neurotic tribal chanting from the background, the tail end of this trailer starts to look an awful lot like a Mad Man teaser, bombarding viewers with a puzzling collage of unhelpful quotes like “Everyone knows everything” and “Em, are you awake?” While the cryptic approach fits the tone of the film, it leaves room for some frustration and confusion.
