Contagion (2011)

A doorknob. A menu. A credit card. A bowl of peanuts. A handrail. An empty glass. We unconsciously come into contact with a multitude of objects and people carrying bacteria and viruses that transfer oh so easily. A member of the CDC tells us that we touch our faces tens of thousands of times a day and never even realize it. I touched my face twice writing this first paragraph only to catch myself doing it after it was done.

"Contagion" is a brilliantly paced thriller about the spread of a deadly epidemic whose final death toll ends in the millions. What starts as a single American carrier who contracted the illness from a diseased pig ends up across the globe. These types of films are the scariest to me because they're real. Sure, movies like "28 Days Later" touch a nerve because their near-plausibility is amplified by "gotcha" moments, but a movie like this is all the more terrifying because it doesn't rely on make-up, CGI or a weird premise to get to us. All it has to do is explain biology.

It's classified a thriller because it's a race against the clock. Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet play members of the Center for Disease Control who must contend with an ever-mounting number of contractions and fatalities and must try to find a cure before statistics can beat their science. We know how this goes: rumors and scare-mongering lead to stereotypical skeptics talking about funds and logistics, while reporters bring up N1H1 and how the health organizations were over-prepared for a non-emerging crisis. But that is in the early days.

A month later the nurses are on strike, false prophets are making money from quack drugs and there is rioting in the streets over food. What the film accomplishes so wonderfully is never breaking the sense of realism that it begins with. Its pace begins with a slight tremor, but never mounts to anything more than a rumble. There is no explosion of mass confusion and violence that a lesser filmmaker might choose to do. It's observant and quiet. The bonds we form with our characters are never more than a toe into their lives before we move on to something else.

There are faces that feature more prominently than others. Members of the CDC are shown more frequently some other people; Matt Damon plays a man grieving over the death of his wife and son while trying to keep his daughter protected; Marion Cotillard is a doctor held hostage by a village in hopes of obtaining the vaccine; Jude Law is particularly interesting as a sensationalist blogger out to expose the lies of the government. None of these people, however, are what makes the story. In the grand scope of the film they are simply pawns in a 7 billion person game of chess, and their faces begin to look more plastic as the story goes on.

A disease film could choose to focus on the global implications of the disaster or to center in on the human aspects. I could criticize this movie for not taking one of these routes and exploring it more fully, but I won't. Director Steven Soderbergh has played a balancing act that I think has worked very effectively. I am a Darwinist and a Hobbesian, so any film where I can observe the breakdown of our "society" gets props from me. What happens when a vaccine runs out? Or a relief truck is emptied? Or the police are too busy to check on a murder? That's what fascinates me, and "Contagion" tries to peer in at all of these questions.

All in all, this is a well-acted and well-constructed horror film for the modern age. You may find yourself standing a bit further apart from people after you finish watching and that's the whole point. By the way, I touched my face another six times...

3/4