‘Contagion’ Called It, Revisiting the Prophetic Medical Thriller
In the late summer of 2011, Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich) and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum) released a brilliantly crafted medical thriller called Contagion. The film explores how healthcare professionals, government officials, and everyday people handle a global pandemic. Soderbergh enlists a star-studded cast who play characters each affected differently by the chaos of finding a cure for a deadly virus.
Cut to today, in 2020, thousands of people around the globe are dying from the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). The film is seeing a revival in the second streaming era; when it was first released, it was one of the top rentals on iTunes. Soderbergh’s foreshadowing would stick with audiences for years, as his medical horror fantasy mutated into reality.
The film opens with the sound of Gwenyth Paltrow’s cough, as it fades into her red-nosed face. A cough escalates to a fatal flu that spreads across the world, killing millions of people. Paltrow’s character is the focal point of the film, as she unknowingly brings a new harmful virus, MEV-1, into the United States. For various plotlines, Soderbergh uses his classic multilinear storytelling technique seen in his previous films Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven. The stories are set by showing vignettes of global sickness.
Key players of the Center for Disease and Control (CDC), played by Laurence Fishbourne, Kate Winslet, and Marion Cotillard, race to find the root of the virus by traveling to China and visiting those close to the infected. Everyday people, like Matt Damon’s character, exemplify the chaos that ensues society as the blooms into a global pandemic. The film uses fiction to explore real issues, like the reluctance of bureaucrats funding resources for the sick, and civilians fighting to save their neighborhoods-turned-impoverished villages.
Soderbergh approached screenwriter Scott Z. Burns about making a film that could actually happen in real life. While this film is also deemed to be science fiction, the investment that the filmmakers have in making the science as accurately as possible, makes it stand out from the others in the sci-fi genre. The accuracy is no coincidence; Burns and Soderbergh enlisted the help of Dr. Ian Lipkin, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University.
The uniqueness of the film is due in part to the cinematography and score. Soderbergh gives his films a signature. His ability to disorient and engage his audience is shown in the first half hour when the camera closes in on Paltrow’s character having a seizure. The muted color grading and the hand-held camera shots give the film a documentary style, a look that not many other major motion pictures can accomplish with such ease,
Cliff Martinez’s gripping score also complements Soderbergh’s style with a futuristic sound that turns this film into a real horror flick.The fast beats and the haunting sound of the piano on the first track, “They’re Calling My Flight”, plays in the background and sets the audience up to feel uneasy for the duration of the film.
Contagion is an accelerating thriller that is very on-brand viewing for self-quarantine. While film is one avenue to escape from harsh realities, this thriller offers a lot of great insight of the beginnings of a global pandemic. The film is made with the style and technique necessary to tell a story so large. Essential viewing for the quarantine-post apocalyptic watch list.
