Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic thriller is cold, quick and frightening in the way a good textbook is frightening. It cares more about how a virus travels than about anyone it kills, and for 106 minutes that is the right choice.
Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic film has the shape of a 1970s disaster picture, a dozen stars and a catastrophe that circles the globe, and then removes almost everything the genre usually spends its money on. Nothing burns and nobody outruns anything. What Scott Z. Burns’s script offers instead is a procedure: how a virus gets from a bowl of nuts in an airport bar to a hundred cities, and what doctors, officials and frightened people do in the weeks after. It is cold, quick and frightening in a way we did not shake off for days, and we like it a good deal more than most critics did.
Soderbergh shot it himself, and the camera does the virus’s work. It settles a beat too long on a bus pole, a glass on a bar, a hand on a doorframe, and by the twenty-minute mark we were reading every hand on every surface as a threat. Minneapolis is lit grey-blue and Hong Kong a sickly yellow, so we know which city we are in before the caption arrives. Stephen Mirrione cuts between continents with those captions, city and population, and lets the numbers carry the dread. Cliff Martinez’s score is a low electronic pulse that quickens as the case count does, mixed low enough that we heard every cough.
The cast is large and Burns gives most of them one job and one scene to be human in. Jennifer Ehle is the best thing in the film as Ally Hextall, the laboratory scientist who works out what the thing is, and she plays her with patience and a faint irritation at everyone slower than she is. Kate Winslet’s Erin Mears is sent to Minneapolis to trace contacts and spends most of her time on a hotel phone explaining the arithmetic of infection to men who would rather not hear it. Laurence Fishburne gives Ellis Cheever the heavy stillness of a man who knows the public will not believe him. Matt Damon has the domestic strand as Mitch Emhoff, a husband who turns out to be immune and cannot see why that is meant to be a comfort.
Two moments got at us. The first is an autopsy a few minutes in, when a pathologist folds back the top of a scalp, stops, and tells his colleague to call everyone; the film cuts away before we see what he saw, and we flinched anyway. The second is Damon being told that his wife has died and asking when he can go and talk to her. He asks twice. It moved us more than we expected from a film this cool, because Soderbergh does not underline it. The doctor says her piece and leaves, and Damon is left in the corridor.
Not every strand holds. Jude Law’s Alan Krumwiede, a blogger, is written as the villain from his first line, and every scene with him is an argument the script has already decided he loses. Marion Cotillard’s Leonora Orantes flies to Hong Kong to find the first case, and her story then takes a turn we will not describe; the film has no time to make it land. Bryan Cranston, Elliott Gould and John Hawkes get a scene or two each and are set aside. Howard Cummings’s empty places, a school gymnasium turned into a ward, a pharmacy stripped to the shelves, say more than most of the supporting cast are allowed to.
Soderbergh made Traffic (2000) as a film about the drug trade with many hands and no centre, and this is built the same way, with a virus in place of cocaine. Next to Outbreak (1995), with its monkey and its helicopters, it looks like the work of an adult. Most critics held its coolness against it. We think the coolness is the point: the film never once makes an epidemic exciting, which is the one dishonest thing it could have done.
It runs 106 minutes and carries a 12A, and the certificate is right; there is almost no blood, and everything it does to you is done with hands and surfaces. Watch it at home if you like. You will look at the remote afterwards, and then at your fingers.
