New Delhi: Disease outbreaks have long fascinated movie-makers and watchers alike. From campy zombie horror movies to bio-political conspiracies and more scientific takes on global medical pandemics, this is a genre that never gets old. And with coronavirus cases on the rise in India, many people are working from home, while still more are avoiding parties, cultural events and community celebrations such as Holi. This means a lot more time to Netflix and chill (it’s not an STD, after all). Here’s a list of the best pandemic movies to watch if you’re at home. Stock up on the popcorn.
Contagion (2011): Steven Soderbergh’s medical thriller hits freakishly close to home, given that it tells the story of a virus transmitted from bats to pigs to humans in China ends up causing an outbreak affecting more than 26 million people worldwide. It’s had a massive surge in viewership numbers lately. What makes it so compelling is Soderbergh’s taut direction, reasonably accurate science and an all-star cast including Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet.
Outbreak (1995): The Wolfgang Petersen blockbuster takes us to the African jungle, where a deadly virus was discovered in the 1960s and kept secret by US Army officers who destroy the camp where the infected soldiers lived. Almost 30 years later, a virologist sent to Zaire to investigate the outbreak of a virus that is hosted in a monkey. He soon finds out that his superior knew about the earlier virus all along. Between attempts to sell the monkey in the black market and to use the virus as a biological weapon, Outbreak is every conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. It’s wildly implausible and inaccurate, say experts, but it is also wildly entertaining, helped along by Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding Jr, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland and Patrick Dempsey.
Virus (2019): Based on the Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala in 2018, the Malayalam movie centres around the efforts to control the virus that originated in fruit bats and killed 17 people. Starring an ensemble cast including Kunchacko Boban, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Revathi, Rima Kallingal, Tvino Thomas, Asif Ali and Joju George, the movie’s focus is how the spread of the disease was contained and how authorities worked overtime to trace contacts of patients.
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28 Days Later (2002): Danny Boyle’s now-cult action thriller is about how animal rights activists release a bunch of infected chimpanzees and unleash a rage-causing virus. It is widely credited with the revival of the zombie horror genre of movies, which had seen a sharp decline in the 1990s. Interestingly, Boyle himself does not consider it a zombie movie, but both in terms of its portrayal of rage-filled survivors, its exploration of the way a a deadly outbreak can cause society and its accepted rules to completely break down (the attempts to lure women into sexual slavery are horrifying), is very much part of the zombie movie genre. And it led to a mad wave of zombie movies in its wake, including Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (a remake of the 1978 action thriller), Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland (2009) and a sequel, 28 Weeks Later.
The Andromeda Strain (1971): An adaptation of Michael Crichton’s eponymous book, the Oscar-nominated sci-fi thriller directed by Robert Wise is centred around a life-threatening alien organism, and how scientists and the military work to eliminate it. If you’re looking for an action-packed movie in which lots is constantly happening, this slightly long drawn-out plot might not be it, but if you like a more scientific, academic approach, you’d enjoy the focus on testing labs, identifying the organism and how it works, and why certain people survived.
Special mention: Blindness (2008): Starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal and Danny Glover, the movie is an adaptation of Nobel winner Jose Saramago’s 1995 acclaimed eponymous novel. It’s unique in that it centres around something that isn’t fatal — communicable blindness, with absolutely no symptoms of illness. But it goes way beyond that, to explore how a terrible situation can bring out the worst in people. An outbreak of blindness leads the government to quarantine all the infected in an asylum with virtually no support or efforts to cure them. Julianne Moore plays the wife of an infected doctor, who lies that she is blind just to be with her husband. All the while maintaining her facade of blindness, she is witness to horrific crimes that take place in the asylum, including when food deliveries run short and women are forced to submit to rape in exchange for food. In fact, this is an outbreak movie that’s less about the disease and more about how people respond to it.
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