Writer: Dzamira Dzafri

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Watch this if you liked: “Memento” and “Misery”

It is pretty amusing thinking about how this movie came from the same guy that gave us all the gift of watching well-known male actors strip for a living in "Magic Mike". But this also explains why Steven Soderbergh would cast Channing Tatum in this type of film. It is mainly a drama, a psychological and thrilling drama.

Normally Tatum's name would not come up on this type of film, but there you go. He was surprisingly competent in this as well, though he was upstaged by a few great actors.

The first thing that needs to be mentioned in how great the lead actress, Rooney Mara was in her role. Mara has always been a favourite, after being cast in David Fincher's films like "The Social Network" and the American version of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo". She had immersed herself into a brand new person with her role in this film, Emily, and it almost made her seem unrecognisable compared to her previous projects.

Mara's character, like most of the others, is complex and strange and hard to pin down and somehow it is projected well to the audience as the story is told. It would have been really easy for her to play the character like how most actresses would, which is a normal girl with a mental health issue, but she did not go down that road and it was admirable.

As the story unfolds, her character gets even harder to understand and when you finally realise what is going on, you will feel slightly betrayed. But that is the fun of this movie.

The lead male character, Emily's psychiatrist played by Jude Law, was also a great part. Law might not have that much personality in his role that Mara had but he still did his character justice. He was also quite complex, but as the story suddenly turned to him as the movie's perspective he was free to be the guy audiences are expected to root for, even if the story was more complicated than there being a "good guy" and a "bad guy".

Catherine Zeta-Jones also plays a role in this. She is though just a secondary character and is not that important in the story, really. Or she has not really given much of an impression. Her character might have played an important part of the story, and her role was interesting to uncover but her part in the film sort of bored me a little. She seemed a bit too unenthusiastic about her commitment to his role and it showed.

The film's synopsis is pretty vague but it is better to keep it that way because the story is so plot-based it is recommended that you who are interested would just go in the theatre and just enjoy it.

It's pretty entertaining if you love psychotic dramas. It is not as thrilling as it was anticipated but it is still worth watching even though towards the end you will find yourself predicting the outcome. You go in thinking it is a movie about the dangers of prescription drugs but let's just say that there is far more to it than that.

Cinema Online, 19 March 2013