Contagion

Contagion (2011) is Steven Soderbergh's disaster thriller you can watch online on iFILM. A woman flies home from a Hong Kong business trip, starts coughing, and collapses dead on her kitchen floor within days. That is how the pandemic begins.

The virus jumps from a handshake to a doorknob, from a subway rail to a face. Soderbergh runs several threads at once: a CDC epidemiologist (Kate Winslet) ships out to the first hot zone, official Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) holds the line in Atlanta, and a WHO researcher (Marion Cotillard) hunts patient zero across Asia. Matt Damon plays an immune widower trying to keep his daughter alive. Meanwhile a conspiracy blogger, played by Jude Law, peddles a fake cure as panic spreads faster than the disease.

Writer Scott Z. Burns worked with real virologists, which is why this 2011 film was later revisited as an unnervingly accurate forecast. Bryan Cranston and Gwyneth Paltrow round out the ensemble. The tone stays cold and near-documentary, with no movie heroics. Stream Contagion (2011) online on iFILM.