Contagion
(Warner Bros., 2011)
Starring: Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne
This movie was made in 2011, which makes the fact that it absolutely mirrors what we are experiencing in real life during the 2020 pandemic so chilling and so cathartic. There is nothing like watching exactly what you’re going through, down to the period costume detail and the enforced socially distancing laws, to help you get it all out and feel better.
Beth Emhoff, a young, beautiful, and ambitious-in-the-twenty-tens-sense-of-the-word executive returns from a business trip only to die mysteriously of a flu before the horrified eyes of her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and her two young children. The next morning, her son is dead as well, and it is up to Mitch, who is somehow immune to the virus and his daughter, Rory (Anna Jacoby-Heron), to stay in quarantine in their upper middle class suburban bungalow and survive the scourge until a vaccine can be found.
So you get the drift. Spot on. Watch this movie when you want to objectify the very real world around you, and watch from a distance as humanity struggles with a worse virus than this one and comes out okay on the other side. This movie reassures you that even though things are pretty freakish and downright surreal at the moment, at least you’re not alone. Matt Damon and even Gwyneth Paltrow are going through exactly the same thing that you are.
—Bev
cinematherapyblog 