15 Years Later, Contagion Still Feels Alarmingly Relevant
The plague may be over, but we have countless Jude Laws now.
Fifteen years after its release, Steven Soderbergh's 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion is almost too frightening to watch for one simple reason: reality caught up to fiction in a big way. It's no surprise that viewers rediscovered Contagion in 2020 after the emergence of COVID and sent it to the top of the streaming charts, because the film's unnerving vision of a worldwide viral epidemic and societal breakdown suddenly seemed way too realistic. The scariest part? It could still look like a straight-on documentary if we're not careful.
Directed by Soderbergh in a style that echoes minimalist ‘70s pulse-pounders like The Andromeda Strain and Colossus: The Forbin Project, the film (written by Scott Z. Burns) weaves together several different narrative threads, starting with a woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) who returns home to Minneapolis after a business trip to Hong Kong with a gift no one would ever want. Shockingly, she and her young son both die shortly after her arrival, as does the former lover she hooked up with during a layover in Chicago, although her husband (Matt Damon) is apparently immune to whatever’s just wiped out half his family.
As the novel virus spreads across the United States and the rest of the world, CDC director Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and epidemiologists Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) and Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) race against time to isolate it, determine its structure, and hopefully design a vaccine. Meanwhile, millions more die, food and necessities run out, and society begins to break down, while an online conspiracy theorist (Jude Law) spreads rumors that the government isn’t telling the public the whole truth.
Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it? While the MEV-1 virus in Contagion is both deadlier (26 million die globally) than COVID (which has officially claimed more than seven million souls, although the number could be higher) and faster-moving, the effects are still, in many ways, what played out in real life: hospitals overflow with the sick and dying, the world shuts down as people stay indoors and practice social distancing, and exhausted scientists struggle to cure a disease they barely understand.
And then there’s Jude Law’s Alan Krumwiede, who relentlessly pushes a suspect miracle cure called forsythia, in a subplot that’s incredibly prescient about the wild (and debunked) speculation that ran rampant for supposed COVID treatments like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. Krumwiede eventually claims forsythia cured him after he contracted MEV-1; we then learn that not only did he not have the virus, but that he has a financial stake in forsythia’s marketing. Late in the film, once a vaccine is produced, Krumwiede urges his viewers (who blindly raise money to bail him out of jail) to stay away from it — shades of a certain anti-vax proponent who’s now the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The race for the cure in Contagion is unusually credible.
The greed and pettiness of human beings in extreme circumstances is unsurprisingly pervasive. A Hong Kong official (Chin Han) holds a World Health Organization scientist (Marion Cotillard) hostage as a ploy to get the vaccine delivered early to his village, Minnesotans riot when government-prepared meals run out and loot pharmacies looking for forsythia, and even the most noble souls are capable of self-serving deeds, as when the otherwise steadfast Dr. Cheever quietly warns his wife to leave Atlanta ahead of a massive quarantine that he’s not supposed to tell anyone about.
There’s no question that we caught a glimpse during the 2020 pandemic of the potential chaos that Contagion zeroes in on, and the terrifying thing is that we’ve seemingly learned little from it. Childhood vaccination rates are down, willful misinformation is rampant, all-but-obliterated diseases like measles are returning, and there seems to be a new food recall every day. Almost seems like the setup for a movie, right? We can only dread what might happen when the next COVID slouches out of a cave somewhere to be born, but if you want a peek at one possible outcome, watch Contagion again. Above all else, it’s one hell of a great suspense thriller — just cross your fingers that it stays that way.
Contagion is streaming on Prime Video.
