Before you turn on your television, iPad, or laptop this weekend and drown in choice – likely, pandemic-themed options, given that the entire world is fixated on COVID-19 and its ripple effects, and for good reason – The Globe and Mail presents three best cinematic bets that are worth your coveted downtime – whether you’re under quarantine or not.
Contagion (Netflix)
Matt Damon as Mitch Emhoff in Warner Bros. Pictures' thriller Contagion.Claudette Barius/Supplied
Every film critic in the world has spent the past week watching the same thing: Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. It is the obvious decision, maybe even the necessary one – although it was an easier option for me, given that the film is currently streaming on Canadian Netflix, but in the U.S. is available only for digital purchase. Most everyone has already written that the 2011 film is terrifying, prescient, devastating and, by its conclusion, somewhat hopeful. I won’t pretend to be the first one to tell you that Soderbergh and his regular screenwriting collaborator Scott Z. Burns have crafted a film uniquely fit for our COVID-19 times, just a decade ahead of schedule. I also won’t pretend to be the first one to try to craft a Gwyneth Paltrow-as-patient-zero joke, coming up with something related to Goop, and tossing it in the trash. But I will say – and I’d like to think that I’m the first, but probably not – that the film represents not only a window into how the current pandemic might play out, but how much Soderbergh’s film reminds you of how different mainstream Hollywood has treated its production pipeline. I honestly cannot imagine a major studio making such a high-budget, star-packed, politically complex film today that has no immediate franchise potential. But through whatever lens you decide to view Contagion, the film remains a remarkable exercise in high anxiety.
Train to Busan (Netflix)
The 2016 South Korean hit Train to Busan, directed by Yeon Sang-ho, is one of the best zombie movies ever made.
Aside from Contagion, the 1995 Dustin Hoffman thriller Outbreak (which has not aged well, trust me), and a more forgotten-to-time film such as Elia Kazan’s 1950 drama Panic in the Streets, there is not a lot of pandemic-centric cinema out there that doesn’t take the premise a sci-fi or horror step further by introducing zombies or the like. (The excellent Children of Men comes closest to fitting that rigid categorization, but it is also just too prescient and thoroughly depressing a film to even think about right now.) So if we’re going to talk about outbreak-y cinema, but we want to avoid feeling too morose, let’s lean into genre hard, with the 2016 South Korean hit Train to Busan. Not only is director Yeon Sang-ho’s film one of the best zombie movies ever made, it is also one of the best tick-tock-thriller-taking-place-on-a-speeding-train movies ever made (of which there are a surprising number of competitors). The film follows the standard zombie apocalypse narrative – mysterious sickness breaks out suddenly, city descends into chaos, motley crew of survivors gather forces – but moves ridiculously fast, and with enough technical skill and emotional awareness to match. You might even feel a tinge of hope by its finale, which is all anyone can ask for at the moment.
Pontypool (Kanopy)
Steven McHattie in Pontypool, Bruce McDonald’s adaptation of Tony Burgess’s novel, in which a deadly virus spreads not through the air or through zombie bites but instead the use of language.Supplied
Canadians can play this outbreak cinema game, too, you know. We already made 2008′s Blindness (okay, maybe we won’t brag about that), as well as Rabid (the original; sorry, Soska sisters), Last Night (well, it is never specified what is tearing the world apart in Don McKellar’s drama, but I’m going to say “disease” for the sake of this column), and … um, most of the Resident Evil films were shot in Toronto. But there’s also Pontypool, Bruce McDonald’s sincerely excellent adaptation of Tony Burgess’s trippy novel, in which a deadly virus spreads not through the air or through zombie bites, but instead the use of language. It’s a novel premise handled with imagination and wit by the prolific McDonald, who locks his story’s setting down in one small-town radio-announcer booth, leaving DJ Grant Mazzy (a career-best Stephen McHattie) to sort through whatever chaos is going on in the outside world. The film won’t ease any of your many nerves, but it will remind you of how creativity can be the best weapon against horror.
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