Death and taxes* abound in this first look trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s airborne toxic event movie – Contagion.

In truth I’d rather he had decided to adapt DeLillo’s White Noise instead, however with Barry Sonnenfeld the last name attached to that project (gathering dust as we speak) we have Contagion to look forward to.

It’s a common story of families and lives torn apart by some catastrophic event, in this case an airborne disease and, as the trailer shows, there’s plenty of tension and paranoia as the various sides of science and superstition play out.

Strange then that it should look so ordinary. That said Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Elliot Gould, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle make up a pretty outstanding cast with a sizable number of Oscars between them and it’s Soderbegh behind the camera so there must be more to it than meets the eye.

There is an air of Wolfgang Petersen’s 1995 movie Outbreak about this one, not least the impressive cast – Petersen had Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey and Dustin Hoffman fighting off bad spored – but Contagion looks to go one further and have the outbreak… well, see for yourself below.

Be warned that one of the (supposedly) main characters snuffs it in the trailer – given that its a story about the end of the world that’s probably not too shocking an event but if you don’t want to know the score look away now.

Catch Contagion  21st October!

*not taxes – just death.