Listen Up: SHE SAID and WOMEN TALKING

“Everything is sex, except sex, which is power.” — Janelle Monáe

Never underestimate Hollywood’s ability to turn any true story into a movie, even, or maybe especially, its own scandals. How quickly the shock of the new turns into the grist for the content mill. Here it’s She Said, a dramatization of the reporting of the 2017 New York Times story that exposed the decades-long abuses of producer Harvey Weinstein. That he was a bully and a bad boss had been widely known the whole time. Whispers of his sex crimes floated, too, usually on the margins of gossip reports and blind items. But it took this reporting, and others, to break a culture of silence around such shameful practices. This then became one of the first sparks that lit the #MeToo fire, a rolling bonfire of stories outing predatory men in a variety of industries. I wish we could, five years later, point to something more systematic that’s changed other than the ousting of various bad men from prominent positions they held. Still, that’s better than nothing. What we have with this new movie, from director Maria Schrader (Unorthodox) and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida) could’ve easily been a major Hollywood studio simplifying the case and building to a false triumph. Instead, it achieves a kind of unsettled cumulative force. Gathering sources, fact checking, finding corroborating evidence, and eventually clicking publish has a certain tension, and knowing it is only one step toward justice and not justice entire.

There’s definite inspiration from Spotlight in She Said. There’s the just-the-facts approach to interviews and collecting information. There’s the flatly honest glimpses into the home life of reporters. There’s the tone and style—serious, direct, plain, with accumulative force—much like the reporting it portrays. But where the former movie took a story an audience knew the general outline of, and used the specifics of the procedural undertaking to draw deeper understanding as the layers of secrets were peeled back, this one seems to proceed from a point of assumed knowledge on the part of the audience. Some of the names that are dropped and stories that are referenced are mentioned as if we already have that understanding. But there’s still that sense of unfolding discovery, as two reporters (Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan) are tasked by their editor (Patricia Clarkson) of getting the story in publishable shape. The sleuthing elements make for a sturdy, simple studio drama, with lots of talky sequences, some flatly expositional and others with a bit more personality, bringing to life something like a convincing portrait of the import job it reenacts.

Because a good journalism movie is also a detective story, it’s notable that the movie starts with the assumption that the guy who is suspected of committing the crime is absolutely the one who did it. The tension becomes not so much learning new information about the story—although impactful one-or-few-scene performances from Jennifer Ehle and Samantha Morton, along with Ashley Judd as herself, go a long way to dramatizing the pain of their persecutions—but the moral weight of asking the women confiding in them to go on the record. Mulligan and Kazan, inhabiting casually credible portrayals of working mothers, feel acutely the potential pain they’re leading these victims toward, and the sensitivity needed to get them to all agree to take uncertain steps toward outing their powerful victimizer. Its best scenes are ones that drive relentlessly into the process of doing so, in tandem with running through the necessary steps to draft, approve, and fine-tune a major article. The newsroom scenes of shop talk and phone calls and long meetings is a fine conclusion to all this hard work—and the final shot, of a cursor hovering over a button, makes an interesting counterpoint to the whirring presses of newspaper movies past. It’s a culmination of hard work that’s deceptively simple. What happens next is more difficult.

An even talkier exploration of this sort of abuse, and the consequences of speaking out, is writer-director Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. It’s set in a repressive Mennonite community—a few families on a secluded stretch of farmland—where the men keep the women uneducated and under their control. The story starts with the men off to town, leaving the women alone and able to discuss the sexual abuses to which they’ve been subjected. We see haunting flashbacks—quick cut images, really—of bruises on thighs, blood on mattresses. It is upsetting material handled with a soberness and lack of exploitation. Thus Polley keeps most of the film’s action to one meeting where the women gather to talk out their options. Should they stay and fight? Should they stay and forgive? Should they leave? There are few easy answers, and little agreement, at the start. Polley’s filmmaking is typically engaged with such questions, like her best work, autobiographical documentary Stories We Tell which most explicitly sees the ways in which people can thrive on false assumptions about themselves and those around them. That, too, sees the benefits of exposing the truth and talking it out. So here the women are in pain, expressed in different ways, and stand up the arguments that flow from these perspectives.

Throughout, there’s a collection of great actresses—Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Frances McDormand, Sheila McCarthy—ventriloquizing differing points of view, talking points brought to life. They’re partly real, convincing people, partly imagined inhabitations of their thorny debate. Adding to this incomplete sense of reality, the movie is shot in a sickly digital pallor—a super-wide frame with a stretch of wan color correction that seems to bleach out all sense of specificity. It feels like a well-cast experiment, in unforgiving digital that washes out the light and leaves the figures in the frame stranded in a smudge of pale fuzziness. It convincingly makes what could’ve been pastoral, and maybe even a rural ideal on the surface, into something that looks as uninhabitable as an alien planet. This emphasizes both the discomfort of their position, and the difficulties of seeing a way out. But it also emphasizes the conceit of it all—a sense of otherness and remove that heightens the dramaturgy and flattens the debate. I found myself wishing the movie was as powerful as its subject matter and, though it is respectful and an engaged intellectual exercise, the form and function never quite click into place for the transcendence of purpose for which it’s searching. Still, as reality continues to prove, there’s value in the talking, and we’re better off not letting such abuses fall under the powerful protection of silence, even if the results are imperfect.

Tied Up: FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

Another in a long cinematic tradition of excavating an intriguing movie out of a trash novel, director Sam Taylor-Johnson (of the young John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy) and screenwriter Kelly Marcel (of Saving Mr. Banks) treat E.L. James’ bestselling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey seriously as a picture of a problematic relationship between two very different people. It’s a strange, half-convincing film, part movie romance formula, and part psychological melodrama, shot like a thriller but with a cautiously sad core. It appears to head down troubling paths before pulling up short in a sudden conclusion. It’s a girl meets boy, girl tries out boy’s demands, girl’s not so sure she wants to stay story.

A young woman (Dakota Johnson) meets a rich young billionaire bachelor (Jamie Dornan) whose intensity attracts her. He likes her too, aggressively wooing her with expensive gifts, like first edition Thomas Hardy novels. She’s flattered, and allows her curiosity to pull her into his version of a relationship. They’re a study in opposites, she shy and giggly, and he self-serious and creepily controlled in all aspects of his life. She’s a romantic, and prone to drink a little and turn into a Broad City supporting character. He’s a movie workaholic, talking about “business” and standing around handsomely austere skyscraper conference rooms without ever getting into what, exactly, he does. All we know is she’s an English major without a job, and he’s a man who can afford to get his way.

He’s a dominant personality looking for someone to submit to his every whim. He wants to control her. This goes beyond the kinks that have made the story a sight-unseen source of derision and tittering (whips, handcuffs, and the like). She gets a thrill out of having her hands tied to the bedpost. But as their arrangement intensifies, bedroom negotiations soon involve an absurdly detailed and lengthy proposed contract. He’s clearly put in a lot of time thinking about his preferred partner’s activities. She says she’ll think about it, a totally reasonable reaction to his desire to determine her schedule, her diet, where she goes, who she sees.

To the movie’s credit, his increasingly controlling stalkerish behavior – appearing places unannounced, or taking over her life by, say, trading in her car for a new one without permission – isn’t soft-pedaled as twisted romance. A clear line is drawn between sex (even adventurous kinds) and exploitation. The problem isn’t the billionaire’s kinks, but the intensity with which he demands punishment and obedience, and how unwilling he is to pay attention to the needs of his partner. It’s all about his pleasure, his desires. This uncompromising can scare her, and yet she draws pleasure from their encounters, discovering that physical submission doesn’t need to include emotional compromise.

I never quite understood what they saw in each other. It doesn’t work as romance. He sees someone inexperienced and naïve, able to be molded into the partner he wants. She sees a handsome rich guy. What’s love got to do with it? There’s a tricky arc to be played here, a relationship that starts kinked and grows ominous. Johnson’s winning, vulnerable and charming, giving a real movie star performance. (Could we expect less from the daughter of Melanie Griffith and granddaughter of Tippi Hedren?) She bites her lips and rolls her eyes, able to make fun of her new boyfriend’s oddities, having fun with them, and then getting a little scared of how far he’ll go. She’s so good, floating through with intelligence and good humor, she even carries Dornan’s wooden sulky performance that’s mostly glowering and standing upright. (The supporting cast includes small roles for Marcia Gay Harden and Jennifer Ehle, so it’s not hurting for strong women.)

The leads draw clear differences between their characters, as opposites attract. We get several sex scenes that play dirtier in implication than in practice. They’re soft montages with lots of movement and skin but little lingering reveals. Two are set to Beyoncé songs, so you know they're smooth. The film saves the power plays for their negotiations, as she tries to get a “normal” boyfriend and accuses him of just wanting her as a sex slave. Their relationship is presented ambiguously enough, I wasn’t sure what we were rooting for. Do we want a Beauty and the Beast change on his part to loosen his rigid rules, or for her to leave him for someone more playful? I knew I wanted her to leave. He’s a gender-swapped Fatal Attraction waiting to happen. In its way, the movie’s an extreme metaphor for the difficulties couples face trying to compromise.

The movie should be looser and funnier, overheated in passion and problems. Imagine what a Pedro Almodovar approach could’ve ripened it into! Instead, it’s serious and slow, with long stretches of boredom between moments where Johnson’s allowed to leap to life with a twinkle in her eyes. Surprisingly little happens in the middle stretch as she decides whether or not to agree to his terms and submit to his will in all things. It allows ugly implications to creep in around the edges. But there’s a nice mix of giggling curiosity (“You’re so bossy,” she laughs mid spanking) and tentative caution, wondering just how much pleasure he derives from hurting her. She’s smart, refusing to get steamrolled by his uptight dominance, but curious to experiment a little first.

Taylor-Johnson, with cinematography by Seamus McGarvey, films it all in grey steel tones, making a film cool to the touch. It moves like a thriller, weighing its protagonist’s options seriously while keeping her partner’s motivations frustrating and frighteningly mysterious. I was pleasantly surprised to find a film focused on communication and consent, policing boundaries, and ending on what seems to me a triumphant “no means no.” Perhaps it’s a cliffhanger resolved in proposed sequels, but viewed as a single story unto itself, it’s a break for freedom, where a woman leaves a damaged man behind and goes forth into the world with the skills to have a mutually fulfilling relationship on her terms in the future. I’m not familiar with the source material, but somehow I think the filmmakers got the best possible movie out of it.

New Model, Old Parts: ROBOCOP

The remake of RoboCop is a solid science fiction entertainment. It’s packed with sleek, modern special effects, moves swiftly through pertinent and provocative questions of technology and its military-industrial applications, and is filled up with welcome performances from dependable character actors. It’s the best RoboCop film since the first, working through its themes of the nature of free will in tech-human hybrids and devious corporate influence in matters of public interest. It has a sturdy competence that’s thrilling and nicely controlled. And yet the differences between the 2014 model and the sui generis 1987 original – a masterpiece, in my estimation – tell us at least as much about the difference between then and now in the entertainment industry as it does our tech corporations. Now, in a Hollywood landscape where a man who dresses as a bat to fight crime is only ever glowering or brooding, and where our newest Superman movie has no time for bumbling Clark Kent, the idea of a robot cop has to be taken very seriously indeed.

Paul Verhoeven’s ’87 RoboCop wasn’t afraid of embracing the inherent silliness of the concept that finds a wounded cop turned into a crime-fighting machine, while recognizing that making the concept fun and funny need not take away its power or its savage satiric sarcasm. It all takes place in a future Detroit so crime-ridden and cash-strapped it allows a corporation to test new robot officers, the better to privatize the police force with. It’s a serious subject still achingly relevant today – poverty, crime, corporate influence pushing for increased profit by taking over public sector institutions that should be working only for the greater good – but is attacked with such bloody vicious humor, expressing its Reagan-era futurist capitalism ad absurdum through hugely entertaining action and sly playfulness. There’s no scene in 2014’s RoboCop to match the hilariously cold logic that finds a board member shot dead by a prototype during a test that goes all too well.

Instead, Brazilian director José Padilha makes a RoboCop that treats itself only seriously, not allowing the concept’s potentially bitingly funny political and technological arguments free reign to run the tone. It’s more somber, neater, and composed. It deals with big ideas right up front, and throughout, mostly contained in a ranting TV show hosted by a swaggering pundit played with excited anger by Samuel L. Jackson. He tells us how the United States has used ever-evolving drones to police foreign conflicts in which we’ve embroiled ourselves. Some might call it bullying overreach, but he calls it patriotic duty, keeping our soldiers safe by letting robots fight our wars. Why can’t we use these robots to patrol American streets? He blames robo-phobic attitudes. This is satire Colbert Report style, Jackson angrily inhabiting the opposite of the film’s sometimes hard-to-parse political leanings as he badgers the American public and politicians to let OmniCorp privatize police work and keep the streets safe through superior surveillance and strategic outbursts of techno-violence.

The head of OmniCorp (Michael Keaton) decides to up his profits and slip around an anti-domestic drone law by asking his top doctor (Gary Oldman) to help him put a man inside a humanoid law-enforcement machine. The law says no robots, but there’s a cyborg-shaped loophole ripe for the exploiting. They’re in luck Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) recently ran afoul of a local crime syndicate and fell victim to a car bomb. He’s lying injured, in need of immediate drastic treatment if he’ll ever be able to return to work, let alone live. Murphy’s wife (Abbie Cornish) signs off on the procedure, so the doctors – as well as a corporate suit (Jennifer Ehle), a marketing guy (Jay Baruchel), and a weapons’ expert (Jackie Earle Haley) – swoop in and fit the mortally wounded police officer with the best tech billions can buy. He’s part publicity stunt, part supersoldier, all under the control of OmniCorp with his belief in his free will a hardwired fantasy. Where the original slammed Murphy into the suit right away and expected the audience to go along, this new version takes its time trying to make us buy it. We get training sequences and scenes of scheming committees. We get a scene in which we see the poor RoboCop without his suit, a pathetic and gross sight as he’s represented as essentially a jar of pulsing pink goop with a face.

By the time RoboCop goes into action, we’ve sat with the character, watched his agonizingly human face, seen the reactions of the kindhearted doctor and the coldhearted C.E.O., as well as the tearful responses of his wife and child (John Paul Ruttan), and the wariness of his old partner (Michael K. Williams) as his refurbished friend whirs back into the office. The screenplay by Joshua Zetumer soon quickens into a fast-paced actioner with wall-to-wall gun violence and frantic machinations of corporate, media, and political interests. The action is crisp, competent, and smoothly presented. But because we’ve lingered on the pain of the procedure and ruthlessness of the suit and tie villains, it’s no simple kick. The original found great power in characters and plot painted in bold archetypes and sharp satire. Padilha, who directed cop thrillers like Elite Squad and Elite Squad: The Enemy Within in his home country, makes his RoboCop a glum and serious affair, trying for some shading while rattling with periodic outbursts of numbing rat-a-tat gunfire.

It largely works. I’ll take a derivative genre picture tangling seriously (even if, in this case, sometimes clumsily or unemphatically) with big ideas over a slickly competent film without a thought in its head any day. It’s entertaining, teasing out fun concepts and appealing sci-fi imagery, even though they’re borrowed from a better film. Some of its new ideas - an early scene of a man with new robo-hands learning to play the guitar, say - are fast, fascinating, and add a fine touch of humanity to this otherwise bloodless trigger-happy PG-13 approach. And the concept is smartly updated in some ways, incorporating modern-day drone anxieties and surveillance state concerns. (Plus, this time around RoboCop is assembled in China.) The ensemble is well cast, filled with performances that find fun in thin roles, and the leads lend some weight to a token emphasis on familial reunion and tech ethics. Even if in the end it’s not quite as effective or jolting, and certainly not as darkly hilarious, the filmmakers wisely don’t even try to copy Verhoeven’s tone or style. They find a distinctly 2014 approach that’s enjoyable enough, though not possessed with as idiosyncratic a personality or power as lasting. Let me put it this way: it’s effective, but it’s not the kind of movie that will inspire people to erect a statue twenty years from now.

History of Violence: ZERO DARK THIRTY

Zero Dark Thirty is a mercilessly suspenseful thriller, a truthy drama that’s powerfully absorbing as it moves to a foregone conclusion. It is recent events turned into instant ambiguous myth, history rendered cinematic while the ink’s still wet. The story electrically told has intense feelings within. Telling of the decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, especially when starting by playing a mix of static and audio from emergency responders on 9/11 over a black screen, can kick up a desire for revenge. But this is not a movie in which a swooping, heroic camera with broad, patriotic blasts of triumphalism executes a bad guy. Much like Alan J. Pakula and William Goldman’s handling of the then-fresh Watergate scandal in their terrific 1976 film All the President’s Men, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal play out their procedural through the eyes of the professional people who gathered and sorted inconclusive intelligence, chased down tantalizing leads to dead ends, and sweated out difficult decisions every step of the way.

These are professional people and we are allowed access to their seemingly insurmountable tasks. Detainees are painfully tortured for information that is at best tangentially helpful. Informants meet deadly ends. Bureaucratic shake-ups force shifting strategies. Our guide through it all is a tenacious agent played by Jessica Chastain. She, like Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, her closest cinematic relation, is powered by a steely determination to see this investigation through to the end. She guides, prods, and cajoles her coworkers to push further, to simply get something done, even when the exact nature of the something is very much hidden, unknowable in the murk. An officemate in the CIA’s Pakistan office played by Jennifer Ehle asks Chastain how her needle-in-the-haystack operation is coming along. This is a film in which the needle is always clear, the haystack always in the way, and the argument for much of the time is how to analyze a handful of strands. The film is nearly ten years of setbacks and dead ends that are suddenly energized by unexpected breakthroughs, becoming a stop-and-go rush to a long awaited finish line.

Bigelow makes this into the highest-stakes workplace drama imaginable. Violence is used sparingly in the film, occurring suddenly in the field, away from the halls of power where characters try to make sense of it. The supporting cast is rich with great actors doing quickly sketched, jargon-filled, vivid character work. Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Mark Strong, Edgar Ramirez, Harold Perrineau, Mark Duplass, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, and James Gandolfini move around the world of the film, some suits, some military, some Navy SEALs. They each have a job to do and set about doing not a mere patriotic duty, but what they feel is best for their own careers and the lives of their coworkers. A life-and-death mystery plays out simultaneously secretly in cubicles of agencies and embassies and in clandestine spycraft, as well as on a world stage. The latter is kept carefully in the background, through glimpses of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech and Obama’s anti-torture comments on 60 Minutes seen only on TVs pushed into the farthest sides of shot compositions, yet their images are still in sharp focus. Year after year, the big picture, the ultimate goal, remains clear; it’s the foreground, the immediate, that grows fuzzy.

Through the accumulation of detail and interplay between interior and exterior spaces, danger grows and recedes. Through tense focus pulls and quietly layered compositions, the film draws tension out of mundane and brings the mundane into moments of tension. So much is instantly felt when a gust of wind allows a pair of black boots to be glimpsed underneath the hem of a burqa. All is not as it seems. Much like the expertly terrifying sequences following a combat zone bomb squad in her previous film The Hurt Locker (also scripted by Boal), Bigelow creates sequences in which little details add up to sustained nerve jangling suspense. In the opening scene – our protagonist’s first day in the field – she’s instructed to bring a pitcher of water to an interrogator preparing to waterboard a detainee. She draws it from slush in a scuffed blue cooler in the corner of the grimy cell. Torture is shown as a process, a technique, horrifying and casual. Later, there’s a scene in which a maybe suspicious car slowly makes its way into a sandy forward operating base, each puff of its dusty exhaust pipe cause for (hopefully false) alarm.

It all builds, of course, to the raid on Bin Laden’s discovered compound, a mission the details of which are both secret and well publicized. It plays out here in a suspenseful set piece expertly crosscut between grubby night-vision, smoothly dim digital photography, and Chastain sitting before a bank of communications devices back at the base. The special effects are persuasive, William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor’s editing and Greig Fraser’s cinematography are crisp and confident, but this is more than mere edge-of-the-seat climactic action momentum. Though it’s certainly that too, an earned sequence of thrills that come partially from exhilarating clarity at last rising up. Rather than building to a bloody, fascistic blast of propagandistic violence, Bigelow plays the violent acts as almost perfunctory. Osama is barely glimpsed. The soldiers maintain utmost professionalism. The aftermath is relief at a job well done mixed with mournful exhaustion.

This is a self-reflexive and sometimes critical look at events that could have been glorified, that could have easily been cheap thrills on a way to a flag-waving triumphant climax. Instead, Bigelow is interested in creating deep thrills, rooted in character, painted in ambiguity and subtlety. This isn’t a movie that’s about a country’s proxies getting righteous revenge. This is a movie about watching a professional, capable agent getting the job done the best way she knows how, with the best information she can get at any given time. It’s ultimately exciting and moving not because of sentimental human-interest material. No, this film is too crisp and focused for detours like that. What makes this film exciting and moving is how sharp and subtle the character at its core becomes. Chastain creates a matter-of-fact, driven hero, continually underestimated, taking ambiguous steps to symbolic victory. This is not a film that tells us how to think about recent history, but rather, through the eyes of a memorable character, shows it in a convincing, exciting tick tock procedural of uncommonly involving suspense and complexity. 

Going Viral: CONTAGION

The screen is dark. The theater is silent save for one ragged cough echoing in the speakers. Suddenly the screen comes alive with a cut to a clearly ill woman – puffy red eyes, pale skin – sitting at an airport bar talking on her cell phone while rummaging in a small bowl of complimentary peanuts. She coughs again. She’s tired. “Jet lag,” she says. “Day Two,” an ominous subtitle announces. It has already begun.

This is the opening of Contagion, the newest film from Steven Soderbergh. It reteams him with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns who wrote his corporate espionage comedy The Informant!, but there’s nothing funny about their new collaboration. Closer in spirit, if not depth, to Soderbergh’s drug-war epic Traffic, Contagion soberly, seriously, and single-mindedly portrays a global pandemic. It starts with a new strain of a disease, deadly variations on common ailments. Once infected, a person is contagious without knowing it, spreading it to those nearby. Then, flu-like symptoms set in. Then come the seizures. Then, all too often, comes death. By then, there are already more people to count among the growing numbers of the infected.

It all starts with the woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) in the opening scene. She’s returning home to Minneapolis from a business trip to Hong Kong.  Her husband (Matt Damon) and her son (Griffin Kane) are concerned about her, as her symptoms grow ever increasingly worse. A film of massive scope starts small, with this little family unit, but grows larger and larger as the virus makes its way across the planet. We meet scientists (Jennifer Ehle, Elliot Gould, Demetri Martin) tasked with analyzing the disease that has suddenly appeared in Minnesota. Could it have a connection to the mysterious ailment that is affecting certain villages in China? And now there are reports of this strain in London, in Hong Kong, in Chicago. Who came into contact with this one sick woman who happened to cross the globe, who infected her and where did they take the infection? Or is she the source?

The disease spreads. The ensemble grows. At the Center for Disease Control, urgent meetings are held. They’re in contact with the scientists, but no one seems to be able to say for sure what is happening. Laurence Fishburne sends Kate Winslet to Minnesota to investigate what they have taken to calling “Ground Zero.” Overseas, the World Health Organization sends Marion Cotillard to Hong Kong, where they’re working with their own leads. All want to understand this ailment, so that they can cure it. Contracting the disease is not quite a death sentence – some of the sick do survive – but it’s close enough. Everywhere the cameras turn, there are new characters to puzzle through the mess with us, a general (Bryan Cranston), bureaucrats (Chin Han and Enrico Colantoni), even a confident conspiracy theorist (Jude Law) who sees it all coming, posting a viral video of a Chinese man collapsing on a bus, all the while ranting about evil pharmaceutical companies and pure natural remedies. But for all his sense of righteous certainty, he’s no more capable of stopping the pandemic than the ones in power that he castigates.

For all the explanations, the crinkling scientific dialogue and the pulsing montages, the essential source of fear remains elusive. It’s essentially a zombie movie without the zombies. Death is slowly, relentlessly coming. You can hole up, you can hide, but it will inevitably arrive. There’s an invisible source of creeping dread that could infect you and kill you, but not before you spread it to your family and friends. It’s a slow motion freak-out. Soderbergh pays attention to the surfaces we come into contact with on a daily basis. Buttons, knobs, handles, and counters become simple sources of anxiety. He holds the camera an extra beat when someone presses against a door, or punches information into a computer. No one has to speak the word “germs” to start the unsettling sense of grim distress. By the time the world is in a full-blown panic over the pandemic, rioting, looting, protesting, worrying, the germs are only part of the problem.

The characters are moved about as pawns in the cold what-if scenario, this pandemic epic. It’s an extraordinary cast, movie stars expertly deglamourized and not at all safe, but the disease is the real star. The film spends its time reveling in the nuts-and-bolts of its elaborately staged outbreak while allowing the human element to stretch thin. It convincingly sends shivers into audiences with its sole meticulous purpose to put out a chilly, convincing bio disaster scenario. Soderbergh uses his considerable skills as a filmmaker to create a fast pace and a believable atmosphere, effortlessly cutting between the dozens of characters and locations, juggling many plotlines. His camera stares with cold hues, a sickly pallor, and unblinking detachment at the dead bodies, the computer screens, the press conferences, the roundtable meetings, and all those potentially deadly shared surfaces. It’s all too real. It doesn’t have a satisfying ending, but how could it? It's a movie about an overwhelming problem, and tentative, maybe even tenuous resolution. The world as we know it may be hurtling to a believable close, and all one can do is hug your family close before it gets to you. The film doesn’t resolve so much as coast to a poignant stop, and the journey there is terrifying. It’s effective and persuasive, unadorned with obvious embellishment. I found myself shifting in my seat, my popcorn untouched, keeping my hands away from my face as my throat grew scratchy and I fought the urge to cough.