Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is a B-Movie at heart and a public health warning by design – tapping in to public fear of a pandemic.

Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) has a bit of the flu rattling around her insides. She's on the way home to Minneapolis and be with her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and son Clark (Griffin Kane).

By the following afternoon, she’s dead from an unknown cause.

When similar cases start cropping up in Hong Kong and London, a lot of well-dressed and well-paid scientists start to worry.

The Center for Disease Control’s Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) is asked by a deputy from the Department of Homeland Security (Enrico Colantoni) if the growing pandemic could be a terrorist attack.

The reality is no. It's worse.

And by realistically depicting the response to the rampant spread of an unknown virus, Soderbergh makes us feel the intensity and the helplessness of the situation.

Like any of Soderbergh's ensemble pieces, there are many characters to which to devote screen-time, perhaps the only place where Contagion falls victim to its own snot-filled handkerchief.

Kate Winslett investigates the probable cause, Marion Cottilard looks for the origin and Jude Law is a blogger who sees the chance to flog his herbal remedies, and the viewer gets dizzy keeping up with multitude of story strands.

Along with the director's unique visual flair, what Soderbergh does do is posit the idea of a real fear, rather than exagerrated science, his facts are scarier than the key jumps squeezed into the likes of The Happening or say The Crazies.

Similar in tone to the 2006 cult-flick Right At Your Door, Contagion plays the thinking man's horror – and it is horrific – by allowing the recent bouts of Swine and Bird flu to play on the all to weak human psyche.

Watch it and, if the person next to you sneezes, get the hell out of there.

We award this film 3 stars.

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