Compelling ... Rooney Mara and Channing Tatum in Side Effects. Photograph: Allstar/Entertainment One/Sportsphoto Ltd Did Steven Soderbergh just finish on his masterpiece? Or are these reports of his retirement just a ploy on the director's part to get a little respect and make us appreciate him in a way we haven't in a good long while? If so, it could well be working. I am willing to go to the golf course right now, get down on my bended knees on the green, and pretty much beg Mr Soderbergh to put down his clubs, smash his putter, throw his niblick into the pond, forget this retirement nonsense and return to making films posthaste. Because Side Effects is brilliant: a noir psychological thriller - like a 21st-century Marnie, or Rosemary's Baby - that is also an acid satire on big pharma, the mental health profession and its terrifyingly powerful, priestly caste of doctors. There is a compelling lead performance from Rooney Mara who lays down the law with her presence. She demonstrates a potent Hitchcockian combination: an ability to be scared and scary at the same time, and Soderbergh's film manages to introduce its effects in some insidious, almost intravenous way. Fear and fascination swam through my skull simply watching it. And the later scenes involving sex, lies and videotape will be especially involving for those on the lookout for recurrent authorial motifs. Scott Z Burns's smart script is elevated into something else in Soderbergh's hands. As ever, he is his own cinematographer, "Peter Andrews," and using the state-of-the-art digital equipment that he discussed in the recent celluloid-versus-digital documentary Side By Side, he contrives some eerily powerful images, elegantly framed. The simplest scenes - a doctor's office, a subway station, a bar - look like scenes from a nightmare. Watch the Side Effects trailer Link to video: Side Effects: watch the trailer for Steven Soderbergh's new film Jude Law gives his best performance since Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley, playing Dr Jonathan Banks, an ambitious and fashionable Manhattan psychiatrist who thinks of himself as a decent guy. Dr Banks has a heavy caseload, and is more than ready to consider the blandishments of the pharmaceutical industry, who are prepared to pay him the big bucks to prescribe some of the hi-tech anti-depression drugs they are developing. The destiny of handsome, compassionate Dr Banks intersects with that of a beautiful and troubled young woman, Emily, played by Rooney Mara. She is someone else who had grown accustomed to the good life, until her investment-banker husband Martin, played by Tatum, was arrested and imprisoned for insider dealing some years ago. Now he is out, and Emily has discovered that her already existing issues with depression have been intensified by the grim reality of making a home with no guarantees about future income - or anything. She is discovering for herself that a working definition of depression is an inability to imagine the future. After a strangely needless car accident, Emily comes under the care of Dr Banks, who suspects that she is trying to hurt herself, and after some false starts with conventional medication, he puts her on the very latest in prescription drugs. Almost at once, Emily becomes happy, excited, well adjusted and sexually fulfilled. But there are side effects - chiefly a disruption to her sleep patterns and a strange new habit of ultra-lucid sleepwalking. Side Effects is bizarre and preposterous, in some ways, but with Mara's star wattage it has the compelling quality of a bad dream, anchored in what is recognisable reality. Her haunted face is almost like a digital avatar, created through some impossibly sophisticated animation technique. One of the film's most disturbing sequences comes when Martin and Emily attend a smart cocktail party: she, in an attempt to clamp down on the panicky anxiety rising to the surface, absents herself to the bar and sees a distorted reflection of herself in the mirrored wall surface that makes it look as if she has some kind of disfigurement. For an awful moment, that distorted face does not seem any more or less real than the real one. For his part, Law's Dr Banks is the sinister helpmeet, perfect for bringing out Emily's neuroses: he is bland, conceited, self-congratulatory, more than a little liable to indulge a beautiful young patient. Soderbergh shows sure judgment in not including his drugs' Stepford-bland TV advertising - a more clumsily "satirical" movie would have done this - but instead relies on Law's own face as the perfect pharma embodiment. He is specious and self-possessed, credibly human and flawed, but also greedy and vain. What a gripping and disturbing thriller this is. Surely it can't be Soderbergh's last movie. Say it ain't so.