Contagion (2011)

As much as I love Steven Soderbergh, I've always found his style to be rather clinical. Like Stanley Kubrick and David Fincher, his camera is always deliberately placed as though pages of calculations were necessary to pick its precise lens and location. Nowhere has this technique better served him than in Contagion. By simply keeping his camera steady and lingering on various surfaces, he is able to transform the mundane into the horrific. Suddenly a door handle can instill as much dread in an audience as seeing the shark-fin in Jaws. And by carefully limiting the film’s scope to a select group of characters and those whom they interact with, the film’s structure becomes literally viral. We start with one character (Gwyneth Paltrow) and thanks to a few coughs and handshakes, the whole world is at stake within mere minutes. All of the death, violence and mistrust ripples out from there. Yet despite the horrors and Soderbergh’s clinically deliberate style, this isn't a film about how horrible humanity can be. Thanks to Scott Z. Burns’ well researched and immensely compassionate screenplay, it instead comes to serve as a testament to how resoundingly humanity can rally in the face of adversity. Yes people are capable of horribly harmful and selfish things, but they are also equally capable of immensely altruistic acts as well. I wish Soderbergh wasn't “retired” so that we might get to witness the continued flowering of this awesome pairing of writer and director.