- UK release: October 2011
- Director: Steven Soderbergh · Writer: Scott Z. Burns
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; Participant Media
- Genre: Pandemic thriller / procedural drama · Runtime: 106 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Matt Damon (The Bourne Identity, Good Will Hunting) as Mitch Emhoff; Kate Winslet (Titanic) as Dr Erin Mears; Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix) as Dr Ellis Cheever; Jude Law (The Talented Mr Ripley, Sherlock Holmes) as Alan Krumwiede
- IMDb: 6.8 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 85% critics / 63% audience · My rating: 7 / 10
Steven Soderbergh has spent a decade refusing to make the same film twice, and Contagion is the most disciplined version yet of the mode he is best at: the cool, multi-strand machine he built in Traffic, pointed this time at a virus instead of a drug trade. The trick of the marketing is that it has stacked four or five proper stars into the cast and put them at the mercy of a microbe. The trick of the film is that it largely refuses to let any of them behave like stars. This is a disaster movie made by someone who finds the spreadsheet more frightening than the explosion, and is mostly right.
The setup
A woman comes home from a business trip in Hong Kong with what looks like jet lag. Within days she is dead, and so are others who shared her air, her handshakes, the surfaces she touched. The film follows the thing outward from there: into the home of her widower, Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon), trying to keep one surviving child safe; into the labs and corridors of the people whose job is to name the pathogen and stop it; and onto the screens of those who would rather sell you a story about it. There is no single hero and no villain you can shoot. The antagonist is an R-nought, a transmission rate, and the slow grind of an institution working out what it is dealing with before too many people die.
The cast
Soderbergh uses fame as a resource and then spends it carefully. Matt Damon is the audience’s anchor, a grieving everyman whose immunity gives him nothing useful to do except worry, and he plays the helplessness well. Kate Winslet, as the epidemiologist sent into the field, gives the film its most quietly affecting strand, a competent professional doing the unglamorous early legwork. Laurence Fishburne carries the institutional weight as the public-health official making impossible calls under scrutiny, with the gravity he has always been able to summon. The one performance allowed to be a touch larger is Jude Law’s blogger, Alan Krumwiede, peddling alternative cures and conspiracy to a frightened public; he is the film’s needle of contempt for the people who profit from panic, and Law clearly enjoys the venom.
The craft
Soderbergh shoots and cuts the film himself, under his usual pseudonyms, and you can feel the single controlling intelligence. The look is clinical and faintly sickly, lots of cold light and surfaces the camera lingers on a half-second too long so you start to read every doorknob as a threat. Cliff Martinez’s pulsing electronic score does a lot of the unease, keeping a low anxious hum under scenes that are, on paper, just people talking in rooms. The editing is the real star: the film moves between continents and characters with no fuss, trusting you to keep up, and the days-since-exposure structure gives it the relentless forward pressure of a clock you cannot stop. It is a remarkably unhysterical film about hysteria.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Outbreak, and Contagion is essentially its sober older sibling: no monkey, no helicopter chases, no shouting general, just process. Closer to home, it is Traffic with a different subject, the same braided structure and the same refusal to moralise from a height. It also owes something to the cold scientific procedural of The Andromeda Strain, the sense that the most gripping thing on screen can be careful people solving a problem in a sealed room. Where it parts company with all of them is its restraint. It declines almost every opportunity for melodrama, which is both its discipline and, occasionally, its limitation.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are firmly on side, around 85%, praising exactly the plausibility and the chilly intelligence that define it. Audiences are cooler, nearer 63%, and the gap is easy to read. People arriving for a thriller with this cast may want a sharper payoff than the film is willing to give. Contagion is not building to a set-piece; it resolves the way an actual public-health crisis might, through grind and luck and logistics rather than heroics, and that is less satisfying in the gut even when it is more honest. I land closer to the critics, with reservations the audience score makes fair.
Verdict
This is intelligent, gripping, beautifully assembled film-making, and the procedural rigour is the thing I value most about it. It is also, by design, a little cold to love. The very even-handedness that makes it credible keeps you at arm’s length from everyone in it, so I admire it more than I am moved by it, and I suspect I will reach for Traffic before I reach for this again. As a clear-eyed thriller about how a system copes when the worst happens, it is close to the best of its kind, and I will happily revisit it for the craft. 7⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, with DVD and Blu-ray to follow.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film acquired a strange second life from 2020 onward, when a real global pandemic sent viewers back to it in numbers and many of its institutional and social details, the supply panic, the misinformation merchants, the fraught race for a vaccine, started to look less like speculation and more like a forecast. Its reputation has risen accordingly, from a well-made Soderbergh procedural to the pandemic film people actually cite. It now streams on the major platforms depending on region and is widely available on disc and digital.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for moderate physical and psychological threat, brief medical gore. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Threat and horror: Moderate threat includes scenes which show people briefly vomiting or frothing at the mouth before they die. Other moments include brief sight of people being attacked, and a scene showing a gang of young men threatening a woman and child in their house when they search for a possible antidote.
Sex: There are infrequent moderate sex references, including a man reminding a woman that they have just had sex, and a man commenting that the authorities have got a ‘hard-on’.
Language: There is also occasional mild bad language (‘ass’, ‘shit’, ‘bullshit’).
Drugs: There are infrequent verbal drug references when a man denies that he or his dead wife have taken MDMA or Ecstasy.
Additional issues: Medical gore shows brief sight of a woman’s scalp being peeled back as technicians look into her skull.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
