When COVID-19 took root, you nearly knew there could be motion pictures made to money in on the panic and concern 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 factor. Isolation, loneliness, that form of factor. Understandably, most steered away from tackling a straight-up pandemic story.
But then, Steven Soderbergh and author Scott Z. Burns already cooked up a chilling ode to the horrors of a killer virus almost 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 today in 2011, and on the time, its science-heavy tackle the results of an airborne virus appeared fairly fanciful. Even as elements of the world had endured epidemics that generated scary headlines for the international locations 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. However, the lady’s husband seems to be immune.
Ensemble Cast Accentuates Contagion’s Paranoia and Fear
Soderbergh makes unbelievable and scary use of his capacity to wrangle an ensemble forged in these early moments. The movie has Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, and Elliot Gould amongst its quantity. Soderbergh stacks the deck solely to tug off a surprising swerve with a big-name actor struggling a comparatively swift loss of life. There’s no higher solution to set up nobody is protected from what’s coming. Even being immune doesn’t stop individuals from struggling as a result of surprising loss of life of family members.
This is our entry level at first of what’s going to turn out to be a pandemic the place the airborne virus wreaks havoc. Doctors on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control quickly come to understand the extent of the virus’ attain. They scramble towards the clock to each determine and discover a treatment for the virus.
Meanwhile, the rise in instances worldwide causes unrest and panic on a major scale. As we all know all too nicely, 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. But the coldly scientific science of Contagion is probably essentially the most masterful use of it in his filmography.
Yes, Contagion performs issues to the acute finish of the spectrum. However, that’s precisely why it acted as a bizarre form of consolation within the early days of our real-life pandemic. The scenario is dangerous, however take a look at how dangerous it so simply might be. The parallels between actuality and fiction have been eerily shut at the moment.
Unfortunately, life proved stranger than fiction. Reality proved it might provide you with its personal disturbing twist on how individuals actually act in a pandemic. Could Soderbergh have predicted anti-maskers?
