Review-Contagion

In an average day, think about how many times you touch your face, doorknobs, surfaces and how many people you interact with and who have also touched similar public surfaces. Now think if there was a highly infectious virus was born into the environment, spreading with every touch, cough and contact. This is the question that Steven Soderbergh’s latest film Contagion asks and in doing so becomes the non horror ‘horror’ film of the year.

Contagion begins with the clever subtitle ‘Day 2’ leaving the audience and the characters in the dark as to what happened on Day 1, as a philandering wife Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) begins with a cough in Chicago airport on a stop off from her way back from Hong Kong. We see her travel home to her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and son in Minneapolis, whilst also seeing the people she has come into contact with begin to fall seriously ill, and then Beth herself two days later suffers a seizure and dies from the unknown disease. This fatality becomes the catalyst for a chain of events from the initial outbreak of the virus, to attempts to contain it, to the widespread panic, which leads to social disorder and chaos and trying to find a vaccine for the disease. The narrative runs over several interconnecting plotlines- Dr Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) works for the Centre for Disease control and prevention, trying to grasp the severity of the virus and how to handle the impending crisis. He sends Dr Mears (Kate Winslet) an Epidemic Intelligence Officer to Minneapolis to investigate and to trace back. CDC Scientist Dr Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) tries desperately to first try to find the characteristics of the virus, to then find a vaccine against it, risking her own life in the process and motivated by her father, who is one of the infected. Dr Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is an epidemiologist from the World Health Organisation who travels to Hong Kong to identify patient zero and in turn, the origins of the virus. Jude Law plays the appropriately named Alan Krumwiede, a conspiracy theorist blogger, who tries to push a homeopathic cure onto desperate people for his own financial gain. And Matt Damon is the everyman ordinary Joe, a guy who appears immune from the virus yet has lost his wife and stepson, he is mourning whilst trying to protect his daughter, who has returned home, from harm.

Though this sounds like a lot to take in and to cover, Steven Soderbergh is a director who knows how to juggle a multi strand plot, as shown in previous film Traffic, and does with ease and clarity, the time frame of days, from the first outbreak helps to keep track of the events and also highlights how quickly it escalates. Attention is needed but the viewer is rewarded with a more grown up version of the medical disaster movie. It is the matter of fact manner direction that makes it all the more intensely real, rather than a Hollywood style race for the cure hero version. The film is boasted by a stellar cast who weave through the film, intertwining but never trying to outshine each other, theatrics are kept to a minimum, a rarity for a film with so many big names. Some, inevitably, are short changed on screen time, notably Cotillard whose narrative strand is left in limbo for some of the running time and the less said about Law’s dodgy American/Aussie accent the better.

Contagion may feel at times less like entertainment and more like a biological warning, but cinema’s functions are not always focused on the pleasure aspect. It is a smart and very scary film, one to make you squirm and to induce a sense of paranoia, one that may leave you a little wary next time you open a door in public.