If you come in out of the cold and settle down expecting an A-list thriller of the warming Ocean’s Eleven-Twelve-Thirteen sort, you are bound to be thoroughly confused by Stephen Soderbergh’s newest film. Although Contagion features just as many big names and loved faces as Ocean’s Eleven, they don’t last long when faced with the killer disease that is taking over America.

With Gwenyth Paltrow and Kate Winslet dead and (only) Matt Damon and Jude Law left to hold the fort, it becomes clear that Soderbergh is not going for his classic Clooney-Pitt verbal pith and punch, but a new kind of thriller, which is conscious of other techniques of creating mood and conveying a story. The movie is super-saturated with cinematic games. It begins with a recording of hacking coughs, which evolves into Cliff Martinez’s eerie techno-jazz soundtrack. The electronic synth driven compositions are especially threatening because they are foregrounded by scenes full of medical apparatus and technical jargon, which make viewers feel just as lost as the characters in the film. A scalped Gwenyth Paltrow only makes things worse.

The actors themselves become almost incidental to the movie, which weaves in and out of so many different lives that no single one can carry the story alone. Nevertheless, the human dimension of the film is largely shown via Matt Damon, Anna Jacoby-Heron (who plays his daughter) and Kate Winslet (before she dies), who do a fabulous job of understating sentimentality and turning it into appetising slices. Soderbergh successfully directs the few cheesy parts by keeping them stripped back of words and tears and alternating them with clinical boardroom scenes where we are told such helpful things as, ‘the average person touches there face two or three thousands times a day.’ Let’s hope that Soderbergh makes more of this new kind of thriller, and that other directors find the phenomenon to be catching.