It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie the week podcast devoted to a classic film in the way it shaped our thoughts in a recent release.

I'm Scott Tobias here again with Keith Phipps, Genevieve Kosky, and Tasha Robinson.

In our last episode, we looked at the microbial terror of Ilya Kazan's film noir, Panic in the Streets.

Today, we bring it much more up to

date with Contagin, Steven Soderberg's 2011 thriller about what a global pandemic might

actually look like. Sotaberg has always been interested in connecting the dots, and Contagion

does for pandemics what traffic did for the drug war and the laundromat did for the financial

chicanery of the Panama

papers. Written by Scott Z. Burns, the film is a kaleidoscopic treatment of an illness called

M.E.V.1, with a startling 25% mortality rate. It starts with a businesswoman, played by

Gwyneth Paltrow, contracting the disease at a casino in Macau, and bringing it back to America in the home she shares with her husband, played by Matt Damon and their two children.

As the outbreak becomes known to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, they scramble first to contain the virus and then to treat it, sending an epidemic intelligence service officer, played by Kate Winslet, to the front lines.

There are many other characters here, too, including Marion Cotill as an epidemiologist for

the World Health Organization who gets kidnapped in Hong Kong, Jennifer Eel as a CDC research

scientist working on a vaccine, and Jude Law as an Alex Jones-like conspiracy theorist who

seizes the opportunity to enrich himself.

Contagion has been a huge hit lately on streaming rental sites

because people want to know about what they can expect from the coronavirus.

But is it a good idea to watch it right now?

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