Side Effects was an oddly unsatisfying movie. Oddly, because it should have been, and I can’t pin down what exactly didn’t work for me. The plot seems sound. The acting was good. The movie looked great. But in the end it was just meh. Odd.

OBLIGATORY SPOILER ALERT: I’m going to give away everything. I mean it. If this movie is in your Netflix queue and you’re looking forward to watching it, EJECT EJECT EJECT!

Emily Taylor’s husband has just been released from prison where he was serving time for insider trading. On the day after his release, she leaves work, gets into her car and, staring at the EXIT sign on the wall of the underground parking lot, she floors the gas pedal and drives her BMW straight into it.

Jonathan Banks is the psychiatrist who sees her at the hospital. He’s worried that she’s going to try to hurt herself again even though she says she’s fine. He agrees to release her if she makes an appointment to see her at his office. She does, and by the end of her visit he determines that she’s depressed and prescribes medication.

It’s a new medication, part of a clinical study to determine effectiveness, and it has one notable side effect: People who use it tend to sleep walk. After Emily starts to use it, she starts to sleep walk. And then, weirdly, she stabs her husband with a kitchen knife. Three times. Leaving him in a pool of blood, she goes to her room, curls up in bed and covers herself with her quilts, just like she did the last time she was sleep walking.

Emily’s depression is played very effectively by Rooney Mara. I thought she really was depressed, that she really was sleepwalking, and that she really did stab her husband without knowing what she was doing. That right there should have given me a deep interest in seeing how the movie played out. Jonathan Banks, played equally well by Jude Law, figured out she was really a homicidal sociopath who conspired with her lover, another psychiatrist played by Catherine Zeta-Jones (and if Catherine Zeta-Jones slithering into the picture isn’t a red flag that something bad’s gonna happen, I don’t know what is). Wowzers. That should’ve grabbed my interest and held it in a death grip, too. And although Banks was initially duped by Emily, he not only gets the upper hand in the end and expose the conspiracy, he also manages to outfox Emily and exile her to a psych ward where she wanders the halls, tranked on thorazine.

And I just didn’t care. Neither did My Darling B, so I know it wasn’t just me. It’s weird, but there’s everything to like about this movie, and yet there was nothing I really cared about. I didn’t care about the people, I didn’t care about the story. Nothing.

Odd.