I remember a question the Factory Manager saw before: If someone decides you are crazy and throws you into a mental hospital, how do you prove you are not sick? The best way is: live your life as a normal person would, without saying much, without explaining, eat when you should and sleep when you should. However, everyone wants to prove that they are not sick, but there are people who pretend to be sick.

Another film from the “never mess with women” genre – Side Effects

Every time I see a film with this kind of darkness, the excitement and thrill in the director’s head goes up. The psychological game of mutual harm between the protagonists – she harms him, he harms her, he harms him, she harms her …… – is simply brilliant. And the factory manager off the screen, long ago, has leisurely stoned melon. It is really a good show! As soon as this movie starts, the picture is just like Hitchcock’s Psycho. Emily, the heroine, is dripping with depression. Since her beloved husband was jailed four years ago, Emily, who has been devastated inside, has been suffering from depression ever since. She has gone from innocent beauty to melancholic beauty. Depressed and lifeless, every day was a misery like the walking dead. Until her husband was released from prison four years later, Emily’s depressive symptoms did not get any better. She lost more and more weight, and from time to time, she would suddenly break down; their life as a couple was as uneventful as stagnant water; even worse, Emily would deliberately drive her car into a wall, in a clear attempt to die. However, Emily loves her husband very much. How could she face her husband, who had just been released from prison and needed the comfort of his wife? In order to return to a normal life, Emily reaches out to Jon, a psychiatrist, hoping that he can help her. However, the anti-depressant medication that Jon prescribed for her only provided temporary relief and had no substantial effect. After consulting Jon, Emily started taking a new type of antidepressant that had just been introduced recently. Sure enough, her mental state was much better than before. Not only was she extraordinarily active in bed at night, but she was also as energetic as if she had been on a diet in normal life.

However, medicine can be toxic in three ways. With this high state of mind came a side effect: Emily began to sleepwalk. In the middle of the night, she would get up from bed, play music, cook dinner and pour milk. Her husband, who was asleep, was confused by her. So Jon suggested she stop taking this new drug. But Emily didn’t agree. Now she could finally look like a wife, and besides, who would want to go back to the depths of despair she had been in before, when she had so easily returned to a normal life? With no choice, Jon had to add to her current medication an ingredient to prevent sleepwalking. But soon, tragedy struck anyway.

On that very day, a sleeping Emily once again floated around the room like a ghost. Just as she picked up the kitchen knife and started chopping vegetables, her husband, who had come home from work, came to her side and the whole scene looked warm and harmonious. Emily, who was sleepwalking, turned around and stabbed her husband three times, and no matter how much he called for help, the unconscious Emily could not hear her.

Killing someone while sleepwalking would have been a horrible thing to do. But the difficulty was that Emily woke up without any idea who had killed her husband. Until she was taken away by the police, she still insisted that she was innocent of the crime. There is one more person involved in this murder case. Emily’s psychiatrist, Jon. As a result of this bizarre killing, Jon has since become notorious and notorious to everyone and his reputation is completely disgraced. But, as the suspect Emily’s psychiatrist, Jon has been assisting the police in their investigation of this case. For in the history of past crimes, there have indeed been cases where people have been acquitted for killing in their sleepwalking.

For the sake of the innocent Emily, and for his own sake, Jon has since taken on the role of Sherlock Holmes and started investigating the whole case. In the course of his investigation, Jon discovers that all seems not as simple as it seems. Emily works at an advertising agency, which does not contain the colleague she once mentioned. The car advertisements on the walls of the company were also playing over and over again, which meant that she should have been very familiar with the car contraptions in her mind. And just before she drove her car into the wall, she knew to put on her seatbelt. This includes the fact that she once attempted to jump onto the underground tracks, calculating in advance that the underground staff would surely come and pull her along. Was she really depressed? Who was lying, anyway? If she was not ill, why did she kill her husband?

Behind Emily’s back, it’s as if there is another person manipulating her …… As the plot progresses, the pace slowly begins to pick up, suspicions grow, and the conflicts of the characters, gradually emerge. The factory manager’s whole heart was in his throat.

Not to mention what the truth of the matter really is. The biggest highlight of the film is the female lead, Emily, played by Rooney Mara. From the very beginning of the film, Emily is melancholic, neurotic, soft and protective, and every time she appears, she is stunningly beautiful. Rooney Mara carries herself with a literary flair that adds to the character. But there is also a fog of inscrutability about her. Is the seemingly innocent Emily the white rabbit? Or is she a demon?

And Jude Law plays Jon, a doctor caught up in a murder case. Although his hairline is slightly receding and his face is not as good as it was then, his intellect is on the line throughout. As a psychiatrist, he is not at all sloppy in detecting the case, and his backstabbing is slick. How can he solve the mystery in front of him in the face of more and more unfavourable conditions? Because of the suspenseful nature of the whole story, from the very beginning of the film, the director uses a large aperture soft-focus lens to create a psychedelic effect.

The cinematography, the soundtrack, and the pacing, the cold, dark style, are all done to perfection. It’s all done in one fell swoop. Most importantly, I was expecting the film to be a critique of psychiatric drug abuse, but I didn’t expect the second half of the film to be a “bloodthirsty, uncomfortable, unisex” ethical story.

It’s a reversal and then a reversal, and it’s really unexpected. In fact, the core of the film is still a cliché – the unpredictable nature of human nature, which no one can predict. In order to satisfy one’s own selfish desires and achieve one’s goals, one can even do anything and do some crazy things. But, as the title of the film suggests, Side Effects. Does this side effect come from drugs, or from the human heart? Every outsider can get it. It is still the insiders who are pitiful and pathetic when they do more than their fair share.