5 out of 5

Directed by: Tim Mielants

Movies and shows about epidemics certainly aren’t new.  Sometimes they’ll try to put a twist to the cause or the effects, but it’s essentially the same.  Effectiveness thus boils down to presentation.

The first thing I saw along these lines was Outbreak, which I found all sorts of thrilling as a youngster but couldn’t apply it to my reality at all.  And watching it later, it’s very Hollywood; very sensational and slightly dumb.  A ton of variations on this later and I watched Soderbergh’s Contagion, which successfully gave me the chills for the procedural way it stepped through the cluster-fuck of a disease outbreak.  But Cordon?  Cordon took notes from Contagion, going through the process – outbreak, containment, reaction – one step at a time, but then managed to scare the shit out of me.  Because this is pretty much how I can see things going down, and the expanded runtime allotted to ten episodes versus a two-hour movie gives us a more complete understanding of how things progress or degrade.  It felt realistic.  While Cordon starts sewing the seeds of conspiracy halfway through, making me nervous that some unnecessary THIS GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE TOP nonsense would unhinge things, even this aspect of the plot ends up resolving in a wholly believable way that by no means undermines anything that came before… and in fact, frighteningly justifies some of what we’ve seen.  And besides handling this central concept so well, director Mielants and writer Carl Joos manage the most difficult task of juggling several storylines in a seamless fashion.  I never felt myself wishing to know what was going on with another group while we’re watching whichever other one, nor did I roll my eyes when some least favorite plot-thread would appear; everyone’s bit in the thing is compelling, and only loosely threaded together so that we don’t have to go nuts with aligning timings and he-said she-saids, while at the same time establishing a grounded world in which these people exist and can interact.

The acting is solid all around.  The lead officer inside the cordon, Jokke (Wouter Hendrickx) and his friend’s (a police commissioner) girlfriend, Jana (Liesa Van der Aa), also inside the cordon, stand out as bringing particular pathos and weight to their roles, but the entire cast – which could all be said to be supporting – really sold their parts.  The cinematography has a familiar grainy look that we’re used to for these “raw” shows, but there’s an appreciable amount of (seemingly) natural lighting that diffuses the effect a bit, and creates a nice juxtaposition of the trashpit the area inside the cordon turns into and the bright, blue sky.  The opening credits are a perfect summary of the outbreak while also setting up the right nervy tone, and whoever edited the “next on…” closing bits was a genius: never lying to us, choosing the perfect clips to give us a note of WTF context without giving anything away.

Is it flawless?  No.  Sure, there’s some excess in the script.  But it felt appropriate for the ‘Cordon’ world, just maybe strippable had they wanted to bring it down to 8 or 9 episodes.  Though considering how invested I felt for all 10, I’m absolutely okay with these slight hiccups.

So I know, you’ve read the plot summary, and maybe you’ve said you’ve seen this before.  Yes, plotwise, you absolutely have.  But this is admirable execution of the topic, and definitely worth a view if you like getting freaked out by asking yourself which part you would play if this happened to you.

Last plus: the infection doesn’t make people zombies.