
Side Effect
- heavy
- brisk
- extreme
- surreal
- bleak
- cold
Heavy, kinetic, extreme horror / thriller, surreal in texture. Nihilistic, mid-stakes, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →A traumatic experience leads to a break-up between a young married couple. In a desperate attempt to save their marriage, Andrey, the husband, seeks help from a psychic named Mara. His only wish is to make his wife Olga forget the past. Mara's magic works, but the second honeymoon soon turns into a living nightmare... Andrey gradually recognizes that he is dealing with a powerful evil that possesses his wife, and the price of the psychic's service is Olga’s life.
Our read · Side Effect (2020) reads as a heavy, kinetic, surreal horror · thriller · supernatural entry — extreme in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, cold in temperature, nihilistic in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
More info & search links
The shape of Side Effect
What watching it is actually like.
“You want Russian horror where psychic help turns marriage into nightmare.”
Skip it tonight — You cannot handle on-screen sexual violence or intense folk horror.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
Calibrate yourself









