When COVID-19 took root, you nearly knew there could be films made to money in on the panic and worry of the pandemic. They got here — after all — and the higher movies to come back from that preliminary interval selected to concentrate on the human ingredient. Isolation, loneliness, that sort of factor. Understandably, most steered away from tackling a straight-up pandemic story.
However then, Steven Soderbergh and author Scott Z. Burns already cooked up a chilling ode to the horrors of a killer virus practically a decade earlier. Prescient and haunting, it was little shock that individuals flocked to it as soon as extra within the early days of COVID-19.
Contagion arrived on at the present time in 2011, and on the time, its science-heavy tackle the consequences of an airborne virus appeared fairly fanciful. Whilst elements of the world had endured epidemics that generated scary headlines for the nations not actually affected by them, it nonetheless felt like a distant risk.
In Contagion, a girl returns from a enterprise journey to Hong Kong and dies from what seems to be a flu-like an infection. Then her younger son dies the identical day. Nonetheless, the girl’s husband seems to be immune.
Ensemble Solid Accentuates Contagion’s Paranoia and Worry
Soderbergh makes improbable and horrifying use of his means to wrangle an ensemble forged in these early moments. The movie has Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Legislation, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, and Elliot Gould amongst its quantity. Soderbergh stacks the deck solely to drag off a surprising swerve with a big-name actor struggling a comparatively swift dying. There’s no higher strategy to set up nobody is protected from what’s coming. Even being immune doesn’t forestall individuals from struggling because of the sudden dying of family members.
That is our entry level in the beginning of what is going to grow to be a pandemic the place the airborne virus wreaks havoc. Docs on the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management quickly come to comprehend the extent of the virus’ attain. They scramble in opposition to the clock to each determine and discover a treatment for the virus.
In the meantime, the rise in instances worldwide causes unrest and panic on a big scale. As we all know all too effectively, solutions simply can’t come shortly sufficient to cease the influence.
Soderbergh dipped into horror in his storied directorial profession, most prominently in 2018’s Unsane, and can dip wholly into it for his upcoming movie Presence. However the coldly scientific science of Contagion is probably probably the most masterful use of it in his filmography.
Sure, Contagion performs issues to the intense finish of the spectrum. Nonetheless, that’s precisely why it acted as a bizarre sort of consolation within the early days of our real-life pandemic. The state of affairs is unhealthy, however have a look at how unhealthy it so simply may very well be. The parallels between actuality and fiction had been eerily shut at the moment.
Sadly, life proved stranger than fiction. Actuality proved it may give you its personal disturbing twist on how individuals actually act in a pandemic. Might Soderbergh have predicted anti-maskers?
