Some movies find their moment once, upon release, and then there are titles that find it even 15 years after their arrival, and this medical thriller is proof. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, released in 2011 and running at a lean 106 minutes, belongs firmly in the second category.
Fifteen years after it first arrived in cinemas, the medical thriller has taken the No. 1 spot on HBO Max’s Top 10 Movies chart in the US, where it has held its position across June 6 and 7. Before this, it had steadily climbed through the 6th and 3rd positions from June 4 onwards, until it reached the top spot.
The timing of its return to cultural conversation needs little explanation, as Contagion is one of those rare films that functions as both gripping entertainment and something closer to a public health document. Audiences who discovered it during the COVID-19 pandemic found it unnervingly prescient, while viewers coming to it now find a story that is both intelligent and urgent.
This combination, along with a stacked star cast, has kept it circling back to the top of streaming charts in a way few films of its era have managed. The movie grossed $136.5 million against a $60 million budget, and featured an 85% Certified Fresh rating from critics and a lower 63% from the audience.
What Is Contagion About?
Soderbergh’s film tracks the rapid global spread of a deadly airborne virus from its first contact — a returning traveler played by Gwyneth Paltrow — through the cascading failures and heroic efforts to contain it. The ensemble cast is a remarkable one, too. Matt Damon plays a father trying to protect his daughter in a collapsing society, Kate Winslet is a determined CDC officer racing to contain the outbreak, Laurence Fishburne is a senior health official navigating institutional pressure, and Marion Cotillard is a WHO epidemiologist caught up in increasingly dangerous territory.
Jude Law rounds out the cast as a conspiracy-peddling blogger who is muddying the information landscape at the worst possible moment. Soderbergh moves between all of them with a clinical, almost documentary-like precision, connecting them to each other without score swells or false comfort. There is only cold, hard logic, transmission rates, and an institutional response playing out in real time.
Contagion Is One Of The Most Important Films Of The Century
What made Contagion exceptional in 2011 was exactly what made it devastating in 2020: it was right. The film consulted extensively with epidemiologists and public health experts, and its depiction of how a novel pathogen spreads and misinformation proliferates was modeled on reality. The outbreak movie was freakishly accurate, especially in its concluding scenes.
Few mainstream movies have taken scientific accuracy as seriously, and fewer still have managed to make that accuracy genuinely thrilling, rather than dry. Contagion did both, and it trusted its audience to follow along without oversimplifying the complicated things, and the viewers responded. With its recent rise to No. 1 on HBO Max, it is obvious that Contagion continues to have an impact on people.
Contagion
- Release Date
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September 8, 2011
- Runtime
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106 minutes