Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion follows Beth Emhoff, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, as she returns from a Hong Kong business trip. During a Chicago layover she meets a former lover. She feels slightly ill. Two days later, back home in Minneapolis, she suffers a seizure and dies from an unknown illness. Her 6-year-old son, Clark, dies too. Beth’s husband, Mitch, played by Matt Damon, is isolated and found to be naturally immune.
Trailer, via ClipZone: Horrorscapes.
The Virus That Kills Within Days
The film tracks the spread of a lethal airborne virus and the worldwide medical community’s race to find a cure and control the panic. Scott Z. Burns wrote the screenplay. The cast is an ensemble: Marion Cotillard as Leonora Orantes, Laurence Fishburne as Ellis Cheever, Jude Law as Alan Krumwiede, Kate Winslet as Erin Mears, Jennifer Ehle as Ally Hextall, Bryan Cranston as Lyle Haggerty, and Elliott Gould as Ian Sussman.
In Atlanta, Department of Homeland Security officials meet with Cheever of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over concerns the disease may be a bioweapon. Cheever sends Mears, an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, to Minneapolis. She traces everyone who had contact with Beth and negotiates with reluctant local bureaucrats for a public health response. Mears becomes infected and dies. She is buried in a mass grave.
MEV-1 and the Cell Culture
The virus is a combination of genetic material from pig and bat-borne viruses. Scientists cannot find a cell culture to grow it. Cheever determines the virus is too virulent to be researched at Biosafety level 3 labs and restricts all work to BSL 4. Hextall orders Sussman to destroy his samples. Believing he is close, Sussman secretly continues and identifies a usable cell culture. From it, Hextall develops a vaccine.
Contagion premiered at the 68th Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2011, and Warner Bros. released it on September 9, 2011. It made $136.5 million. The film was inspired by real outbreaks, including the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak and the 2009 flu pandemic. Burns consulted the World Health Organization and medical experts W. Ian Lipkin and Larry Brilliant.
The film’s strength is its refusal to flatter anyone. The multi-narrative style Soderbergh popularized keeps the pieces moving. Law’s Krumwiede, an ardent conspiracy theorist, is the index patient for a parallel epidemic of misinformation. That thread has aged into the film’s sharpest material.
What matters most, ranked:
- Damon’s Mitch — Soderbergh said of him, “You never catch him acting.”
- Winslet’s Mears — the outbreak’s cost made personal.
- Law’s Krumwiede — the lie that spreads faster than the virus.
The weakest link is the vaccine sprint. Sussman’s secret research resolves the crisis too cleanly for a film this careful about failure elsewhere. The tagline is “Nothing spreads like fear,” and the movie believes it.
Contagion is 106 minutes of drama, thriller, and science fiction that plays less like a genre exercise and more like a warning. It is not a horror film. It is a procedural about systems breaking, and it holds up. 8.5/10.
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