Summary
We see a woman, Beth Emhoff, in the Chicago airport coughing. A supertitle reads "Day 2." She speaks to a man on the phone, someone with whom she had an affair while stopping over in Chicago. Beth has been in Hong Kong and is returning home to Minneapolis. The scene shifts to Kowloon, Hong Kong (population 2.1 million), and we see a young man on a ferry who is ill. He stumbles off the ferry and returns to his apartment.
The scene then shifts to a fashion photographer in London who appears also to be suffering from the virus. She puts down a folder in the middle of a shoot and returns home, collapsing and dying there. We switch back to Beth as she returns to Minneapolis (population 3.3. million). As she arrives home, she greets her son and husband. We then see another person, a man in Tokyo (population 36.6 million), falling ill while riding a train and collapsing. Back with the man in Hong Kong, we see shots of a meat market as he wanders into the street and gets hit by a car.
In Atlanta, Georgia, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Ellis Cheever arrives at work and speaks with a janitor about the janitor's son's ADHD. The scene shifts to San Francisco, where freelance journalist Alan Krumwiede watches a video of someone suffering from the disease. Alan speaks with a coworker at the paper, Lorraine, about his theories about the disease, which has to do with mercury poisoning and fish from Asia. "We don't want to be the paper that cries wolf," she tells him, urging him to lighten up on the conspiracies, but promising to show it to someone at the paper. He threatens to sue if she doesn't take his story, and leaves in a huff.
In Minneapolis, Mitch Emhoff, Beth's husband, goes to his stepson's school to pick him up. Clark is suffering from a fever and goes home with Mitch. A supertitle tells us it is Day 4 of Beth's illness and she looks worse than before. Suddenly, she drops a mug on the ground and collapses in convulsions. At the hospital, she dies. Mitch becomes very angry, asking for answers the doctors cannot give him. On the way home, Mitch gets a call from the babysitter that Clark is ill. He returns home to find that Clark has died.
In Geneva, Switzerland, Dr. Leonora Orantes arrives at work at the World Health Organization. We hear her discussing the quarantine protocol, and also discussing the fact that the origin point of the disease, Hong Kong, is one of the most densely populated areas in the world and a harbor, which means that the disease will certainly spread. Orantes discusses all of the geographic clusters in which the disease has appeared, as we see a montage of more and more people coming down with the disease.
The doctors perform an autopsy on Beth Emhoff. In Atlanta, Dr. Erin Mears visits Dr. Cheever at the CDC and they discuss a plan of action: to isolate the sick and quarantine people who may have been exposed. Meanwhile, Mitch's daughter Jory visits him at the hospital, where he is in isolation. They speak on a phone and he assures her that he is not feeling sick.
Dr. Mears speaks with people at the health center in Minneapolis and tells them that the disease is spread on surfaces and people touch their faces two to three thousand times a day. Some of the Minneapolis representatives are skeptical, as Dr. Mears tells them that they need to pay attention to the reproductive rate of the virus as well as facts about whether a person can be contagious without exhibiting symptoms. In a biosafety laboratory at the CDC, Dr. Ally Hextall and David Eisenberg put on hazmat suits and discuss the virus.
Analysis
The film is immediately suspenseful and unsettling in tone, as it opens with a woman in a large public space, an airport, coughing. As we know that the film is called Contagion and concerns the spread of a deadly virus, the cough is not insignificant, even though the woman, Beth, attributes it to a simple case of jet lag. Director Steven Soderbergh builds the suspense by zooming in on the objects of daily life, which are also the vessels for the spread of the virus. He zooms in on Beth's debit card as she hands it to a bartender at the airport. We then see a young man on a ferry in Hong Kong who is suffering from the same illness and Soderbergh zooms in on a pole that he grabs. Soderbergh increases the horrific dimensions of the plot by showing us the ways that contact and spread are unavoidable in public life.
Suspense is also built by the fact that the film is an epic ensemble drama. In the first ten minutes of the film, the camera travels all around the world, introducing us to different people, some who are suffering from the same disease, some who have completely different perspectives on it, but all of whom are linked by their fear of and fascination with it. It's a large and entangled web of narratives, a web that mirrors the spread of the virus itself. Individuals living completely different lives are forced to reckon with the same threat, which links them all to one another.
It is not long before the horrors of the deadly disease begin to affect the central characters. Not long after arriving back home, Beth falls ill and dies, followed immediately by her son Clark. Her husband, Mitch, is left behind, desperate for answers that do not exist yet. The film presents two sides of a pandemic narrative. On the one hand, we see the authorities who are charged with understanding and diagnosing the issue, people at the CDC and WHO, attempting to observe the disease from a distance. On the other, we see the ordinary citizens whose lives are thrown into a complete tailspin by the disease. Soderbergh establishes a potent tension between the worries and grief of someone like Mitch Emhoff, and the detached authority of characters like Dr. Cheever and Dr. Orantes.
Orantes and Cheever observe the state of the virus from afar, but Dr. Erin Mears emerges as a particular kind of protagonist when she goes to Minneapolis to look at the virus firsthand. As an epidemiologist on the "front lines" of disease control, Mears is charged with a terrifying mission: to both examine the disease more closely and to help people in small communities take the necessary precautions to prevent its spread. Her problem is both a scientific and a social one, and she meets with resistance almost as soon as she arrives in Minneapolis. Skeptics wonder how they will be able to prevent the spread when so many people are determined to continue living their lives, but Mears is set on trying to control the disease.
Director Soderbergh does not spend any time setting up the characters in the film in any way that does not relate to their relationship to the disease. There is no exposition to tell us about who these people are in their lives apart from victims or investigators of the virus. Beth Emhoff is first shown coughing in the opening of the film. While we learn that she has been sleeping with someone other than her husband, and recently traveled to Hong Kong for business, these are the only details that we are given about this character. Thus, we see that the film is not as invested in unique individuals themselves as it is in looking at the ways that deadly diseases have a ripple effect across communities.
