Krishna
A delightful movie, a complete surprise. If in Cowboys and Aliens, you wonder if the movie could be bad with such megastars in it, only to be disappointed, you go to this movie wondering if a Jude Law movie can be truly entertaining, given his recent string of disappointments. (Hugo, slow, and Repo Man etc) and this movie is far better than you expect!
The story is told very well, slowly escalating tension, taking you in one direction where you feel sympathy for the helpless victim before abruptly turning the story around in an unbelievable twist. While you digest it, there begins another game of cat and mouse, with each party trying to outwit the other, and it becomes a fascinating story of unexpected twists.
The story revolves around Emily Banks (Roony Mara), a housewife who falls in love with a rich investment banker Martin Taylor (Channing Tatum) and is teleported to a rich world beyond her imagination. Just when she is beginning to enjoy a perfect life, her husband is arrested for insider trading, and is about to lose all his money, and her world comes crashing down around her.
He comes back to her but life is not the same ever. The trauma affects her mind and the first indication of it is an attempt by her to crash her car against the office garage wall. She is injured but survives. She is now assigned to Dr Jonathan Banks, a psychiatrist. (Beautifully underplayed for the most part by a very different, interesting, Jude Law) Conventional therapy does not work. Regular SSRIs do not do the trick.
Emily sinks into depression. When Jonathan counsels Emily, he comes to find that she was seeing another psychiatrist, Dr Victoria Siebert, and she abruptly dropped her. Emily refuses to tell him why, and intrigued, Dr Banks goes to see Victoria (A very different Catherine Zeta-Jones minus the glamour and looking, as the part demands, considerably older!) She does not know why Emily left her either. In conversation, she says that she was planning to start Emily on a new experimental drug called Ablixa. Dr Banks is skeptical. However, when Emily has another episode where she is about to walk into the railway tracks in another attempt at suicide, he tries the drug in desperation more than anything else.
It seems to work miraculously. Emily is happy and fully recovered. There is this unanticipated side effect of sleepwalking.
In the meanwhile Dr Banks has his practice flourishing. He becomes a spokesperson for another drug company, which brings in money and has a lot of retainer arrangements to make him extra money.
All that disappears in a scandal when, during one of the sleepwalking episodes, Emily kills her husband and goes to prison. Banks valiantly tries to save her, giving expert witness to prove that she was not conscious when she did it, and gets her admitted to an asylum for treatment, instead of to jail.
When the bad publicity (bad judgment in prescribing experimental drugs) threatens his career, he goes investigating to prove his and Emily’s innocence. There he stumbles upon some facts that disturb him. She buckled herself with a seat belt before crashing into the wall; why? Does not seem like an act of a suicidal person. She made sure that the security was watching her before ‘trying to walk into the path of an oncoming train’. Why?
There starts one of the several twists in the story. Was Emily faking the suicides? He decides to find out by administering her a truth serum upon objections from colleagues and against all ethical methods. When she just slurs her speech but admits nothing, his suspicions get confirmed, mainly because his truth serum was a ‘placebo’ and should not have caused any effect on a guiltless person!
He goes to find out what is really going on and in the process his family life is destroyed, his kids and wife leave him, he loses all his agency deals and is fired from his professional office. His determination only intensifies.
A brilliant story. To tell you the rest would only give away the great ending and further twists.
I would not hesitate to give it a 8/10
— Krishna