Showing from Feb 22: Side Effects ****

MCT

Stars: Rooney Mara, Channing Tatum, Jude Law.

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Rated: R

Showing: Southside. Daily at 7:45pm except Sunday 4:30pm..

Runtime: 106 minutes

Crime, drama, thriller

The baseline mystery of Steven Soderbergh’s masterful Hitchcockian thriller Side Effects is “What’s really going on here?”

The film keeps viewers emotionally invested yet intellectually off-balance, suffusing even the most ostensibly straightforward scenes with a sense of free-floating anxiety.

It pays off with edge-of-the-seat chills, walloping surprises and an uncanny ability to make complex plotting digestible.

Rooney Mara plays depressive Manhattanite Emily Taylor, whose husband, Martin (Channing Tatum), following a stellar Wall Street career, was convicted of insider trading. Now freed, he attempts to rebuild their damaged marriage and restart his career. Hollow-eyed Emily asks her psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), to prescribe Ablixia, a promising new antidepressant. After a due-diligence check-in with Emily’s former therapist (Catherine Zeta-Jones), he agrees. Of course, any psychopharmaceutical comes with side effects such as disorientation — and possibly murder.

You might suspect that Soderbergh, who often makes corporate malfeasence a theme of his work, is revving up for an indictment of the drug industry. “Ablixia” kind of sounds like “oblivion,” right? But thanks to a tremendously crafted, diabolically twisty script by Scott Z. Burns (Contagion), almost nothing plays according to expectations.