Contagion

I read somewhere that Stephen Soderbergh intends to stop directing films. I hope this isn't true. Here, he has made an engaging and intelligent film about an epidemic of an unknown disease that kills millions of people throughout the world and triggers social instability.

There is an excellent cast including Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Elliot Gould. Some sequences of the film, including the opening five minutes or so, play almost like a music video, with strong rhythmic music accompanying a sequence of wordless images. It is as though Soderbergh assumes we know how epidemic movies play out and all he needs to do is to sketch in how this one will be. The cinematography is amazing, with dark and shadowy images, some almost in grey-blue monochrome. Most of the cast play medical figures, while Jude Law plays a dissenting blogger and Matt Damon a layman whose wife and step-son die, and who is trying to protect his daughter.

This film eschews the usual Hollywood mayhem of disaster movies and takes a cool, clinical and analytical view of the events, rather as he did in his recent film Che.