In Soderbergh’s new movie “Side Effects,” which he says will be his last as a cinema director, all human interaction is mediated by some abstract force, whether that’s money or a commodified and quotation-marked notion of sexuality or an impressive range of psychoactive pharmaceuticals, most notably a fictional antidepressant called “Ablixa” that serves as an enormous plot MacGuffin. This follows such recent Soderbergh films as “Contagion” (scripted, like “Side Effects,” by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns), whose true protagonist is arguably a pandemic virus; “Haywire,” in which almost every meeting between characters leads to violence; and “Magic Mike” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” tonally opposite but thematically linked films that depict human sexuality as a marketplace and prostitution as its governing metaphor.

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"Everything is accurate in terms of what has gone on and what may be going on," said Sasha Bardey, the medical adviser to the film and a forensic psychiatrist. "As certain medications have gone through the various phases of study, one of the final phases is that it's tried in a clinical setting. The psychiatrist can be reimbursed -- and even paid a fee."

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