Contagion

After seeing this movie, you will feel the need to bathe in hand sanitizer for a week and will look cross-eyed at every person who coughs within a 10-foot radius of your position. If I was a cruel person, I would invite Howie Mandel to the Hollywood premiere just to see the germaphobe go crazy.

Gwyneth Paltrow stars as Beth - a corporate executive on business travel to Hong Kong, who picks up some strange virus that quickly spreads to everyone she comes into contact with. As the virus becomes a full blown pandemic killing so many people a mass panic has begun, Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) is sent to Beth's Minneapolis home to figure out how to treat people, including Beth's husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is sent to Hong Kong to figure out where this virus came from, Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) is in charge of finding a cure and a meddlesome blogger, Alan (Jude Law), stirs up public sentiment against the government.

Who will live and who will die?

Can a cure be found before civilization as we know it ends?

Is this organic, or did someone start a biological terrorist attack on humanity?

Director Steven "I didn't really mean it when I said I was retiring" Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns make Contagion into an irresistible mystery and horror movie. On the mystery end, we see the professionals weeding through experiments and data to find the identity of this odd, out-of-nowhere virus as well as attempt to find a cure before all of society is lost.

Then, Contagion almost feels like a horror movie as we see a patient develop the early symptoms of the disease, pass it along to other, unsuspecting victims and physically deteriorate to the inevitable conclusion. Instead of covering your eyes every time someone walks into a dark room, you are wincing when someone rubs their red nose. It's taught, tense, and shocking to watch, but does draw some laughter at inopportune moments.

Most of all, you have to marvel at how Soderbergh is able to tell so many stories in a tight time frame, and with little dialogue. Scenes are visual flashes without long discussions or involved speeches. Yet, we get just enough to understand what is happening to the characters involved with that moment and their overall story arcs. It's an efficient way of presenting the stories, but makes you wish you had more details about some of them, as the story with Dr. Orantes is lost for most of the movie, as well as the possible military component with the great, underrated Brian Cranston as a commander worried this could be a terrorist attack.

Contagion is a movie that gets under your skin, and makes you wonder about that suspicious guy on the bus who won't stop sniffling.

Contagion is rated PG-13 for disturbing content and some language