Contagion goes viral
Nine years later, rejuvenated title feels all too real. Robbie Collin explains.
I’ve always loved watching Christmas films in mid-october. Out of season, they’re a kind of amuse-bouche for the soul — a sneak preview of the boundless festive cheer that’s just around the corner. On a related note, the other day I decided it would be a good time to revisit Steven Soderbergh’s horrifying viral outbreak thriller Contagion. When it was released in cinemas in 2011, Contagion played like a pessimistic riff on the SARS and swine flu epidemics of the previous decade. After two real-life close shaves, here was an invented, yet bleakly plausible, account of a global pandemic to rival the 1918 Spanish flu, which claimed between 50 million and 100 million lives.
Unlike almost every other notable film to feature a killer disease before or since, from The Seventh Seal to The Andromeda Strain, it’s a work of cool and level-headed realism, and its grasp of the complex mechanics of a public-health crisis — how these things happen, and how they can be fixed — is presumably why so many are now seeking it out. It was written by Scott Z. Burns in close consultation with representatives from the World Health Organization, including Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who worked on the WHO’S smallpox eradication program in the ’70s. To say it’s aged well would be an understatement. In 2020, with its truly global scope and public coughers, the film barely feels like fiction.
I’m still unsure whether rewatching Contagion was a smart move in the current climate, or an incredibly stupid one. On one hand, I’m now living in a fog of existential terror: on the other, I’ve finally managed to stop touching my face. It helps that the symptoms of the film’s fictional disease, MEV-1, chime uncannily with those of COVID-19: a persistent cough, a soaring temperature and shortness of breath.
And once you’ve seen the effect the virus has on Gwyneth Paltrow — spoiler alert: she’s bumped off even quicker than Janet Leigh in Psycho — you may find yourself adopting personal hygiene habits with a renewed zeal. Maybe even singing Happy Birthday at the sink for a third time, just in case.
A well-made film can be more persuasive than any number of leaflets, which Contagion itself cheekily observes. “A plastic shark in a movie will keep people from getting in the ocean,” Kate Winslet’s public health official character muses.
Soderbergh packs in all the looting and screaming and creepily deserted streets you could hope for in a film about a pathogen gone rampant.
At points, the chaos calls to mind 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle’s 2002 post-apocalyptic horror in which a “rage virus” escapes from an animal-testing lab and brings a plague of the infected on modern-day Britain.
Yet Contagion’s particular chill comes down at least in part to the extent to which it feels like a zombie movie without it ever actually having to wheel out any zombies. Things become just as desperate, without a single monster in sight. Nevertheless, Soderbergh still throws in a bit of good old-fashioned Hollywood moralizing. On the way home from Macau, Paltrow’s character
Soderbergh’s heroes are the scientists, toiling diligently behind the scenes, often at great personal risk, to bring the MEV-1 pandemic under control.
stops off for a sly extramarital encounter, which seeds the virus in a second U.S. city and makes things exponentially worse. And you thought it didn’t get any more brazen than Goop.
Perhaps the smartest way in which Contagion defies the disease thriller genre is its decision to make the character who’d usually be the hero the single biggest scoundrel of the piece. He’s Jude Law’s eccentric underdog blogger, whose conspiracy-theorizing coverage spreads a parallel virus of panic, and whose championing of an untested natural remedy turns out to be far from public-spirited. Soderbergh’s heroes are the scientists, toiling diligently behind the scenes, often at great personal risk, to bring the MEV-1 pandemic under control.
They’re the kind of figures you’d happily entrust with your lives — unlike, say, Dustin Hoffman’s rather more gung-ho virologist in Outbreak, who decides the best way to combat that film’s deadly Ebola-like disease is to hunt down an infected monkey.
Contagion is obviously the significantly more sober, clear-eyed film — which is of course what makes it by far the scarier and more effective of the two. Leaving the cinema nine years ago, I remember thinking to myself: yup, that’s probably how it would happen. So I’m going to lock the door, tape up the windows, and wait to be rescued by Kate Winslet and Jennifer Ehle.