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Canberra Today 13°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Contagion (M) ★ ★ ★ ½

WITHOUT slime-covered, multi-toothed monsters threatening to extinguish all human life, Steven Soderbergh’s medical research thriller is as convincing a horror film as you might ever hope to find.

Scott Burns’s screenplay examines the science that mankind now deploys to confront pandemics that begin when an animal carrying a zoonose makes contact with humans. We know that zoonoses – H1N1, Hendra, HIV, SARS – happen but few of us have a clear understanding of how they propagate or how science marshalls its best brains to defend us against them.

Soderbergh tells the story of this zoonose without haste, without miraculously-contrived discoveries (although in their own way, all scientific discoveries are miraculous.) Matt Damon plays a husband whose wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) becomes the first victim.

He happens to be genetically immune, an Everyman making perhaps the film’s most contrived demand on our credulity, but an important link in carrying the plot forward.

“Contagion” summarises the science rather than emblazons it in CG fakery – the micro-image of the bug appears in only one sequence.

Instead, it focuses on people’s responses to the virus’s emotional, economic, political, hygiene and communal consequences, with admirable credibility and restraint heightening its impact.

The good guys win, inevitably. And when Jennifer Ehle exposes a shapely thigh to inject herself, her technique mirrors the one that won a real-life Nobel Prize for an Australian medico.

At all cinemas

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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