Contagion

2011

Director Steven Soderbergh

A maniac breaks into your house and bludgeons you to death with a toaster. Unlikely. Someone touches your face. Or coughs near you. Or breathes near you. Pretty damn likely. Contagion, from director Steven Soderbergh, is the most terrifying film of the year.

When Beth Emhoff returns home to Chicago following a trip to Hong Kong, what initially appears to be little more than a touch of flu, quickly escalates, leaving her dead within hours. This deadly yet mysterious virus spreads rapidly around the globe, as various organisations struggle to contain the potentially apocalyptic threat.

Steven Soderbergh is acutely aware of Contagion’s threat and knows how to amplify. His use of an ensemble cast enables frequent, global, documentary-style cuts. This is as close to documentary as standard narrative film-making gets, complete with locations and population size both included at the bottom of the screen for our terror. However, Contagion’s raw, visceral intensity would have been greater had it simply been done as a fictional documentary. Ultimately, it is the use of its glamorous cast that restrains the film.

Matt Damon as the traumatized father, Laurence Fishburne as the chief scientist and Marion Cotillard as the world’s most ridiculously gorgeous member of the World Health Organization are just three of the A-Listers featured. It becomes like a Hollywood check list. To Contagion’s credit, several of its big names are snuffed out in a hurry, but many of them linger on, wasted beyond pointlessness. Cotillard disappears for about an hour, whilst Jude Law is completely irrelevant as a slimy blogger attempting to profit from tragedy. But Damon underplays it well as the man having to deal with the death of his wife, and Fishburne is sufficiently slick to make his rather wooden dialogue convincing.

Scott Z. Burns’ script does possess some needless drama, but nothing on the level of the 1995 disaster movie Outbreak, which – thematically – is Contagion’s closest relative; although the Wolfgang Petersen film doesn’t share the same sense of realism. Soderbergh’s documentary camerawork isn’t on the same level as Paul Greengrass’ in United 93, but it still manages to conjure an important atmosphere.

Contagion is a bold and poignant effort from Soderbergh, and one with a potentially haunting future. It is flawed: incidental characters and lazy, meaningless insertions of ‘emotion’. But it is extremely unnerving, and scarier than most actual horror films. Just be prepared for the quietest cinematic experience of your life. Marvel as everyone in the audience holds their disease-ridden breath for 106 healthy minutes. Not due to the tension. You cough, you die. Now if only someone did a film about killer mobile phones maybe people would shut the fuck up...

*** ½ / *****