Contagion

With freshers’ flu rife and lectures across campus punctuated by coughing, sneezing victims, the last film health-obsessed students or those of a paranoid disposition should go out and see is Contagion. But for the rest of us, Steven Soderbergh’s latest picture offers a tense, thoughtful watch that explores what would happen in an international virus outbreak.

As with Soderbergh’s 2000 film Traffic, the film is structured into various different narratives, allowing the narrative to document the effect of the growing crisis across many sections of society. Featuring and all-star cast that includes Matt Damon, Jude Law and Kate Winslet, it begins with Beth Ernhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) contracting the disease in Hong Kong whilst on a trip, during which she also has an affair with an ex-lover. Upon arriving home she suffers seizures and dies, along with her son who also catches the as yet unknown virus, leaving her husband (Matt Damon) and daughter alone. The scale of the virus grows throughout the film, which we follow through the various eyes of blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), doctors from the ‘Center for Disease Control and Prevention’ (Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet) and ordinary citizens (Matt Damon).

Rather than emphasising the inevitable emotional, personal stories resulting from the pandemic, Contagion instead focuses mainly on the national scale of the catastrophe; tear-jerking scenes are avoided at the expense of cold, hard numbers, much like those responsible for handling such global disastrous would deal with. The urgent sound of the title too is misleading, as unlike your typical disaster movie Contagion has no huge set pieces and is not packed with action. Instead, the enemy is invisible, spreading alarmingly fast and distressingly difficult to stem.

Yet each character has their own backstory drawn up. Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) is the everyman, who loses his wife and son in effectively gut-wrenching scenes, and is a fascinating watch throughout the film as his initially strong, calm exterior gradually breaks down as he becomes the victim of more and more misfortune, in what is perhaps the film’s most gripping storyline.

Then there is Alan Krumwiede, the arrogant, conspiracy-theory-obsessed blogger, who is by far the most detestable character in the film and is played superbly by Jude Law. Krumwiede uses his blog (or ‘graffiti with punctuation’ as one character dismisses it as) to propose conspiracy theories regarding the government’s handling of the pandemic, and gains a large following. Intriguingly, the film subverts expectation by depicting the common man working alone as a deceiving, self-interested fraud, whilst the political figures, so often portrayed as cold and cynical, are made to be far more sympathetic.

Overall Contagion is an absorbing picture that sets out to suggest how a global outbreak of a lethal virus would develop as realistically as possible, and makes for rewarding viewing; albeit frightening at this time of freshers’ flu!

See Contagion at Reel Cinema. For more information visit http://york.reelcinemas.co.uk/

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