VOD film review: Contagion
Review Overview
Tension
8Shocks
8David Farnor | On 12, Sep 2014
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard
Certificate: 15
Not since a certain 1995 film has the on-screen fate of Gwyneth Paltrow been quite so alarming. Here, Steven Soderbergh turns her into the epicentre of a harrowing global tale of contamination.
At first, husband Mitch (the always-likeable Matt Damon) doesn’t know what to do. What caused her to die? The doctors don’t know. As Mitch rushes to make sure his daughter is unaffected, the infection spreads at a grimly plausible rate.
Enter Lawrence Fishburne and Kate Winslet. They play Science People, who talk in scientific words and use science to cure the problem scientifically. “Has someone weaponised bird flu?” asks a clueless character, who doesn’t speak science. “We don’t need to weaponise bird flu. The birds have already done that,” replies Fishburne with deadpan gallows humour.
As the infection becomes international, biological babble emanates from all over the place. “I can see some structures on the surface that look like glycoproteins, but there’s nothing morphologically pathognomonic,” says one science person who isn’t Lawrence Fishburne. You suspect they may not last long.
When it was released in 2011, that was perhaps the main source of fun while watching Soderbergh’s film: guessing which character would be in the danger zone next. Years later, though, the film would go on to have a chillingly prescient grasp of how viral events occur – with every new location, text flashes up. London. Population: 8.6 million. Title cards have rarely felt so ominous.
Damon and Marion Cotillard bring enough emotion to make you emotionally invested, while Jude Law’s stereotypical blogger gives us an antagonist to actively hate other than nameless microorganisms. The script is taut, too. After an initially unsettling autopsy, Soderbergh avoids gore or cheap shock tactics, quietly ramping up the pace to generate tension. Just the sight of an email with the subject line “updated phylogenetic analysis” is enough to get you panicked.
On a molecular level, Contagion is a formulaic watch, but it taps into the alienation and panic that seize a nation whenever a virus breaks out, and that really is quite terrifying – and, while it might not quite class as escapism that riveting suspense is certainly entertaining. Days after, whenever someone sneezes near you, you’ll start reaching for the anti-bacterial hand gel. Not a lot of fiction can generate a side effect like that.