Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2013

An ambitious psychiatrist (Jude Law) prescribes an unproven anti-depressant for a new patient (Rooney Mara, sans Dragon Tattoo) who’s fretting about her insider-trader husband’s (Channing Tatum, maturing) impending release from prison. The drug causes “extreme sleepwalking” in the patient, and when tragedy strikes, the poor shrink becomes the center of a media firestorm. At this point, this is starting to look like a message movie about today’s proliferation of such drugs. But Steven Soderbergh doesn’t do message movies, and soon we find our perceptions of the characters and events changing as the story moves from social outrage at Big Pharma into high-stakes gamesmanship and duplicity. Rooney Mara holds all this together with a difficult, complex portrayal, preemptively countering, by the way, any potential Lisbeth Salander typecasting. Quibble: it suffers from what I call the “too big a name miscast in a seemingly minor part” problem, but I’ll let you figure that out. This low-key, elegantly coiled bag of tricks is nimbly plotted and thoroughly satisfying. Spot-on soundtrack. None of the numerous twists and turns is unnecessary. And you don’t really realize how smart it is until you put all the pieces together in retrospect. Hitchcock would like this movie.