Showing @ Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh until Thu 3 Nov

While Steven Soderbergh’s medical apocalypse thriller may be a formulaic Hollywood money-spinner (is it worth bringing up Ocean’s Eleven and Traffic?), its investigation into crowd psychology is a potent one, if not slightly overblown. After an outbreak of the MEV-1 virus, a violent strand of influenza mirroring the 2009 swine flu “pandemic”, politicians, defense personnel and health staff attempt to contain the rate of infection as millions soon become affected.

What might at first appear as a painful form of cinematic scaremongering soon becomes a quite intriguing affair. An ensemble cast including Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Gwyneth Paltrow prop up a storyline which is so exaggerated, that one more step would land it squarely in the science fiction genre. The forensic magnification of surfaces and everyday objects, vehicles for furthering the spread of infection, depicts a terror which even manages to seep from the screen to its audience’s minds. And it doesn’t stop at the medical level; political officials become suspicious that other countries are hiding workable vaccines in a throwback to Cold War paranoia. What Soderbergh manages to do is comment on the nature of fear itself, warped and misshapen by online blogging and social media; though comical on occasion, it probes our restless attitudes towards viral opinion sharing and panic at the hands of medical conspiracy.