Forget ‘The Last of Us,’ HBO’s Near-Perfect Pandemic Thriller Is Still the Best of Its Kind

When HBO’s The Last of Us first redefined what trauma really means, it couldn’t have been more timely. Neil Druckmann’s celebrated video game came out in 2013, before the world experienced a pandemic firsthand. This wasn’t the case when the television series hit the streamer in 2023. Fresh from a global pandemic, The Last of Us was highly relevant, which made infected humans puppeteered by evil mushrooms even more terrifying. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be the most prophetic version of a virus.

That honor belongs to Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 emotional thriller that happened to catch fire again during 2020. Now the film has hit HBO, where fans can relive just how intricate and surprisingly accurate the story is. The Last of Us may capitalize on dystopic fears and universal themes about the dangers of love, but when it comes to accuracy and real-world stakes, Contagion has it beat.

‘Contagion’ Is a Hyperrealistic Prediction of a Global Pandemic

No drama has quite captured the chaos of an international virus more than Contagion. The ensemble film covers all angles of the catastrophe, from the World Health Organization to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The thrilling drama is heavily realistic, to such a degree that it predicted many events that would come to pass during the 2020 pandemic.

Contagion charts the illness from Day 1, when patient zero, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), returns to the United States after a work trip in Hong Kong. Before going home, she infects three people who go on to spread it all over the world. Beth’s death is sudden and is directed in a realistic way that makes her demise jarringly clinical. This is the tone that the story takes as the WHO and CDC spring into action to find out how the disease started and any kind of recourse.

Steven Soderbergh’s tight directorial style is what makes the film so engaging to watch, as are the performances from an incredibly stacked cast. No role is small, which is what makes it genuinely surprising and heartbreaking when characters die. A portion of the story follows Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet), who goes to Minneapolis to investigate Beth’s death. Being portrayed by an Oscar-winning actor didn’t protect the character from contracting the disease, which is statistically quite likely. Even more heartwrenching is Mears’ understanding that she won’t survive as she bitterly wishes she could have finished her work.

This is just a microcosm of the best aspects of the narrative. All the character arcs from Laurence Fishburne’s CDC head Ellis to Jennifer Ehle’s Dr. Ally Hextall, who discovers the vaccine, are gripping enough to have their own feature. Contagion also predicted some of the worst parts of the 2020 pandemic, including the conspiracy theories that took people’s lives.

Jude Law stands out as one of the most reprehensible characters he has ever played. Buying stock in a purported homeopathic remedy called Forsythia, Alan Krumwiede uses his platform as a freelance writer to drive up the stock with claims that he cured himself with it. Contagion has been proven to be one of the most realistic movies about a global sickness, which makes the thriller have immense rewatch value to this day. Out of any story about this particular subject, Soderbergh’s stands out as the pinnacle of filmmaking.