“Somewhere in the world, the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat.”

Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s 1970s style medical disaster film about a deadly virus sweeping the globe, is crafted with incredible precision. It boasts an all-star cast (Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Chin Han, Marion Cotillard, John Hawkes, Demetri Martin, Sanna Lathan), a cerebral and scientifically accurate script by Scott Z. Burns, a pitch-perfect score from Cliff Martinez, and superb visual storytelling from Soderbergh-as-cinematographer. But its secret weapon is undoubtedly editor Stephen Mirrione. Mirrione won an Oscar for deftly incorporating three tangential storylines in Soderbergh’s Traffic, and here he is tasked with providing structure to a sprawling collection of narratives ranging from the plight of a janitor to the inappropriate concerns of government executives to the dubious reporting of a zealous conspiracy theorist; from Hong Kong to Geneva to Atlanta.

Politically, Soderbergh smartly walks a middle ground, ridiculing both the hair-trigger truth telling from Jude Law’s journalistic outsider (“Blogging is not writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.”) as well as the large-scale cover-up efforts by the government, bald-faced lies relayed on public television, and special privileges for those in power.

The film paints a grim picture—one that, upon release, drew comparisons to the early days of the HIV/AIDS hysteria. However, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film’s uncannily accurate depiction of then-future events is unsettling. It wasn’t (and wasn’t trying to be) emotionally resonant in the first place. But now that it so easily maps onto reality—everything from social distancing, medical personnel shortages, rioting, burial complications, and mandatory curfews, down to the nonconformist fear mongers vying to make a buck off of a tragedy are eerily realistic—it loses its impact as a drama and takes on the aspect of a lament. It’s perhaps more educational than entertaining, more akin to Chernobyl than The Andromeda Strain.