ONE BIG SPOILER HERE
let's start with reviewer Dan Franzens's good summary of the set up: "Emily (Rooney Mara) is a depressive; her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just returned from a stint in prison for insider trading, but she feels anxious and can't sleep. She visits psychiatrist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who prescribes a brand-new drug to help her out when the better-known brands (Zoloft, Paxil, Wellbutrin, etc.) don't seem to break Emily from her ennui. But the drug, as you might have guessed so expertly, does have its side effects.
It turns out - not a spoiler - that Emily has begun to sleepwalk. Well, more than sleepwalk, she does things in her sleep, like cook breakfast and set the table, all in the middle of the night and not remembering a thing the next day. Tragedy strikes while Emily sleeps. Is she the culprit, or is the drug to blame?"
Well the tragedy-SPOILER- is that Emily kills her husband with a kitchen knife while "sleepwalking." Dr. Banks decides it's the side effect of the new corporate antidepressant that has more marketing money than clinical test results behind it. He helps get her a guilty-by- reason-of-insanity and a stint in a psychiatric hospital instead of life in prison for Murder 1. At the same time, his reputation is in tatters for having kept Emily on a not-very-tested drug in spite of some warning symptoms. So he has some incentive to figure out if something else is going on.
Many fairly suspenseful convolutions later, here's what we're expected to believe really happened. Emily was swept off her feet 5 years before by Martin, her dashing, handsome, affectionate, rich hedge fund guy, and she is about to lead the life of a fairy-princess wife in the enchanted money land of Greenwich, CT. But the feds come down on her handsome prince, and he is sent to a country club prison for unspecified white-collar crimes. We know that in real life that never happens, but more ridiculous things are yet to come. In her unhappiness, Emily sees a shrink, Dr. Victoria Siebert, played with adequate professional frostiness by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Emily draws the good doctor into her first lesbian affair, and naturally uses her jailbird husband's trader tricks to make both of them a pile of money. Either Emily has also fallen in love with Dr. Siebert, in which case she will not go back to her husband but instead live happily ever after with her new girlfriend and pile of ill-gotten Wall Street profits, OR she is toying with Dr. Siebert and using her as a trading proxy. Their is no point to this second possibility, and no coherence to the idea that Emily could make a fortune with what she learned over dinner from her jailed trader husband, since Wall Street makes its money on deal opportunities tied strictly to personal and firm-based relationships to which Emily, ensconced in the office-love nest with her psychiatrist girlfriend, has zero access. But possibility 1 is also not the case: Emily displays no affection for Dr. Siebert at any point ever, and stabs her in the back later on-figuratively in this case. But back to the affair itself: we are told that Emily cooked up the idea of Emily killing Martin when he gets back from prison because Emily is mad at him for getting sent to prison right after he had made her into a fairy-princess. Dr. Siebert is complicit in this. But there is no possible upside for Dr. Siebert and plenty of downside: she loves Emily and wants them to be together, so she would encourage Emily to leave Martin and not stir up every law enforcement agency in Manhattan by killing him. So apparently Emily is a homicidal sociopath who wants to kill Martin no matter what, and somehow persuades the calculating, careful Dr. Siebert to go along, which she would clearly never do. In addition, Emily is willing to be arrested, go to trial, and risk being in a psychiatric hospital for years because, why? A normal sociopath would pay someone to whack Martin and be done with it. Then in the end the noble Dr. Banks (Jude Law) persuades Dr. Siebert to keep Emily locked up, even though the former's only interest is being with Emily, and after Emily betrays her for Dr. Banks, Dr. Banks commits Emily to the hospital for all eternity. So it's the version of noir where everybody is basically evil, except that in good noir people retain coherent motives and the ability to pursue their own interests by destroying others in a semi-logical way. Nobody would ever act the way these characters do whether crazy or not. It's too bad.
let's start with reviewer Dan Franzens's good summary of the set up: "Emily (Rooney Mara) is a depressive; her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) has just returned from a stint in prison for insider trading, but she feels anxious and can't sleep. She visits psychiatrist Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), who prescribes a brand-new drug to help her out when the better-known brands (Zoloft, Paxil, Wellbutrin, etc.) don't seem to break Emily from her ennui. But the drug, as you might have guessed so expertly, does have its side effects.
It turns out - not a spoiler - that Emily has begun to sleepwalk. Well, more than sleepwalk, she does things in her sleep, like cook breakfast and set the table, all in the middle of the night and not remembering a thing the next day. Tragedy strikes while Emily sleeps. Is she the culprit, or is the drug to blame?"
Well the tragedy-SPOILER- is that Emily kills her husband with a kitchen knife while "sleepwalking." Dr. Banks decides it's the side effect of the new corporate antidepressant that has more marketing money than clinical test results behind it. He helps get her a guilty-by- reason-of-insanity and a stint in a psychiatric hospital instead of life in prison for Murder 1. At the same time, his reputation is in tatters for having kept Emily on a not-very-tested drug in spite of some warning symptoms. So he has some incentive to figure out if something else is going on.
Many fairly suspenseful convolutions later, here's what we're expected to believe really happened. Emily was swept off her feet 5 years before by Martin, her dashing, handsome, affectionate, rich hedge fund guy, and she is about to lead the life of a fairy-princess wife in the enchanted money land of Greenwich, CT. But the feds come down on her handsome prince, and he is sent to a country club prison for unspecified white-collar crimes. We know that in real life that never happens, but more ridiculous things are yet to come. In her unhappiness, Emily sees a shrink, Dr. Victoria Siebert, played with adequate professional frostiness by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Emily draws the good doctor into her first lesbian affair, and naturally uses her jailbird husband's trader tricks to make both of them a pile of money. Either Emily has also fallen in love with Dr. Siebert, in which case she will not go back to her husband but instead live happily ever after with her new girlfriend and pile of ill-gotten Wall Street profits, OR she is toying with Dr. Siebert and using her as a trading proxy. Their is no point to this second possibility, and no coherence to the idea that Emily could make a fortune with what she learned over dinner from her jailed trader husband, since Wall Street makes its money on deal opportunities tied strictly to personal and firm-based relationships to which Emily, ensconced in the office-love nest with her psychiatrist girlfriend, has zero access. But possibility 1 is also not the case: Emily displays no affection for Dr. Siebert at any point ever, and stabs her in the back later on-figuratively in this case. But back to the affair itself: we are told that Emily cooked up the idea of Emily killing Martin when he gets back from prison because Emily is mad at him for getting sent to prison right after he had made her into a fairy-princess. Dr. Siebert is complicit in this. But there is no possible upside for Dr. Siebert and plenty of downside: she loves Emily and wants them to be together, so she would encourage Emily to leave Martin and not stir up every law enforcement agency in Manhattan by killing him. So apparently Emily is a homicidal sociopath who wants to kill Martin no matter what, and somehow persuades the calculating, careful Dr. Siebert to go along, which she would clearly never do. In addition, Emily is willing to be arrested, go to trial, and risk being in a psychiatric hospital for years because, why? A normal sociopath would pay someone to whack Martin and be done with it. Then in the end the noble Dr. Banks (Jude Law) persuades Dr. Siebert to keep Emily locked up, even though the former's only interest is being with Emily, and after Emily betrays her for Dr. Banks, Dr. Banks commits Emily to the hospital for all eternity. So it's the version of noir where everybody is basically evil, except that in good noir people retain coherent motives and the ability to pursue their own interests by destroying others in a semi-logical way. Nobody would ever act the way these characters do whether crazy or not. It's too bad.