When Side Effects came out in February 2013, it was quickly overshadowed by its own director. By the time of its release, Steven Soderbergh, who was then just 50 years old and an Oscar winner, had begun talking up his impending retirement, or at least retirement from directing movies. Of course, we now know what happened: after making two seasons of The Knick and embarking on a few other side projects, he returned to features just a few years later with the crime caper Logan Lucky; his second post-retirement film, Unsane, hits theaters today. But even now that he’s back to making movies, it’s likely that Side Effects will remain overlooked, the victim of both a changing movie landscape and Soderbergh’s own unfortunate timing. And that’s a bummer, because the movie is a gem—a throwback to eras when intelligent, star-driven, labyrinthine thrillers were in far better supply than they are now.

On the surface, Side Effects is a familiar kind of mystery, one that you might feel like you’ve seen before: Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) appears to kill her husband (Channing Tatum) during a sleepwalking episode brought on by a new antidepressant. But a series of mounting coincidences convince her doctor, Jonathan Banks (Jude Law)—whose life has been ruined by his role in prescribing the drug to Emily—that there’s a more nefarious design to what’s happened, involving Emily and her former psychiatrist, Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Gripped by an obsession that looks to everyone around him like paranoia, Banks even tapes newspaper clippings of Taylor’s case to the wall, brooding in front of them like, well, a character in a movie.

But therein lies the crucial presence of Soderbergh, a filmmaker whose fluidity with style and comfort across genres might be unmatched among contemporary directors. That versatility is a relic from the old studio days, when the likes of Howard Hawks and Vincente Minnelli would move from comedies to musicals to dramas based on the needs of their employers. Soderbergh has left a similarly wide footprint, and applying himself to Side Effects, he brings a knack for psychological menace and control steeped in the work of Alfred Hitchcock and, especially, Brian de Palma, whose 1980 Dressed to Kill might be the clearest predecessor for Soderbergh’s film.

With Side Effects, that results in a few distinct pleasures that feel very hard to come by these days, in the post-adult era of superheroes and special effects dominating the mainstream marketplace. While his technique here isn’t flashy, Soderbergh makes liberal use of shallow focus to play with the many different points of view at work. The narrative is bifurcated by a perspective shift that would frighten away less sure-handed filmmakers, who might balk at sidelining their main character halfway through. Soderbergh’s also a draw for performers, and Mara, Law, and Zeta-Jones all do some of their best work under his direction: Mara gives Emily both an essential sheen of vulnerability and an uncompromising ruthlessness underneath; Law is simultaneously sympathetic and a bit of a prick in that way only British actors can pull off, lending the film a necessary ambiguity; and Zeta-Jones provides a true movie-star presence, her portrayal of Siebert rich with an ultimately deceptive arrogance.

At the same time, Soderbergh grounds Scott Z. Burns’s slick script with layer upon layer of sociological truth, taking on the banking and pharmaceutical industries in the wake of the recession and using each to cast a shadow on the other. At one point in the film, Siebert tells Banks that he should go back to treating rich white people, and that remark resonates at the end, when the victorious Banks is able to do exactly that, having vanquished his two opponents but changed absolutely nothing about the insider trading and rampant over-prescription that are at the story’s core. The narrative never feels pedantic or obvious but still manages to raise legitimate questions, and it does so through a savvy blend of surrealistic photography—often reflecting the blurry language of psychology and mental illness—and grounding touches of realism: covers of the New York Post, glimpses of St. Luke’s school, and ads for antidepressants that could’ve come straight from the commercial breaks of Jeopardy!.

The true achievement of Side Effects is that it’s both fun and smart, in a way few movies even attempt to be nowadays, financing having dried up for 90 percent of projects that aren’t explicit Oscar bait, dirt-cheap indies, or nine-figure studio tentpoles. We need more movies like Side Effects, not because they’re going to change the world or make anyone a ton of money, but because they’re the perfect encapsulation of what only a film can do: take a Gordian knot of a story, set it in a world fraught with the same issues as ours, fill it with talented, beautiful people, make it look like it could hang on the wall of the Met, untangle the whole messy thing, and get it all done in under two hours. Side Effects is only five years old, but it feels like decades since we’ve gotten another movie like it.