Crisis · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with a table. Gary Oldman's toxicologist sits on one side of a conference table; the people who fund his lab sit on the other. His own data — the assays, the animal trials — say the "non-addictive" painkiller they want to bring to market is worse than the drug it would replace. The geometry of the room tells you everything before anyone speaks: a man, his findings, and the institution that owns the room he found them in. Jarecki keeps staging the film this way, as furniture. Fluorescent corridors, the dean's office, the task-force room, the morgue. Crisis is a movie of places coded for authority, and its quietest invention is to let the architecture of a meeting do the work a confrontation usually does.

That table is the key to what kind of film this is. For Deleuze, most classical cinema runs on the movement-image: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting serves that chain of cause and effect. Crisis honors that grammar — the agent runs his sting, the mother hunts the truth about her son, the scientist decides whether to publish. People here still act. But the film's real subject isn't any one action. It's the relation between three actions that never meet. Deleuze calls this the relation-image, or mental-image: an image whose meaning is built not on screen but in the viewer, who holds connections the characters cannot. This is Thirdness — the audience as a knowing third party. The trafficker, the grieving architect, and the toxicologist are fighting the same system, and the only place that system becomes visible is in your head, in the space between strands. Argue with me if you like that this is just "a multi-strand movie." The Deleuzian point is sharper: the film offloads its principal meaning onto your act of comparison. The cut is the thought.

Which cut, though? The film is a parallel-montage machine, and that grammar has an inventor. Griffith built American organic montage — cross-cutting that runs separate lines toward a convergence, the last-minute rescue where the parallel finally meets. Crisis inherits that syntax directly from Soderbergh's Traffic, its formal template: color-keyed strands, available-light realism, a camera that wants to look like reportage rather than style. But here's the honest wrinkle, and the film half-knows it. The strands rhyme; they don't rescue. The convergence is thematic, not literal — clean hand-offs between stories rather than the associative collisions Soderbergh and Gaghan pushed toward. That conservatism keeps a hard screenplay followable, and it's also why the connections can feel engineered rather than discovered. Griffith's rescue carried a promise that the lines would close. Crisis withholds that promise on purpose, because the thing the lines share can't be reached by anyone running toward it.

That shared thing is the molecule. Fentanyl, OxyContin, the new pill with the clean name — the drug is what Deleuze would call the symbol: the object that condenses a film's organizing relation. It passes through the cartel corridor, the college lab, the suburban kitchen, binding people who will never share a frame. You can't punch it. And this is where Crisis touches what Deleuze, describing the crisis of the action-image, named the condemnation of the plot — the sense of a diffuse plot-behind-the-plot, a system that has no single face. Syriana donated this structure: institutional actors cross-cut elliptically, connective tissue withheld, until the system itself becomes the antagonist. In Crisis the encompasser — Deleuze's synsign, the milieu that calls forth action — is the epidemic as a circuit linking boardroom, regulator, and border. Each protagonist meets it with a large-form gesture (the bust, the vengeance, the disclosure). None of them changes the circuit. The action-image is still running, but its engine is idling against something too big to move.

Place it in the lineage and the film reads as a careful late chapter rather than a first sentence. It owes Contagion its desaturated, sterile palette and its clinical cross-cutting through labs and agencies. It owes Michael Clayton the restrained score and the lone conscience inside a malign corporate machine, the institutional-capture thriller in a minor key. It owes Arbitrage — Jarecki's own — the respectable surface that launders moral rot, transposed from finance to pharma. And behind all of them stands All the President's Men, where dread was built from paperwork, from the patient accumulation of documentary detail rather than from gunfire. Crisis wants that register: research instrumentation, data sets, the assay as evidence.

What did it do to film as an art? Honestly, not much that was new — and its moment foreclosed the conversation that might have judged it fairly. It arrived in early 2021, into a pandemic window where adult dramas migrated to VOD and the mid-budget issue-thriller's whole economic basis was dissolving into streaming, and an off-screen scandal around one of its three leads buried it before assessment. So its significance is partly elegiac: a competent, earnest entry in a discourse — the issue-mosaic from Traffic to Syriana — at the moment that discourse lost its theatrical home. But it teaches one thing cleanly, almost as a primer. It shows you the relation-image working at the scale of a social system, and it shows you the form's built-in limit: breadth bought at the cost of depth, rhyme standing in for consequence.

Watch it once more for the cuts between strands. Each time the film hands you off from the lab to the border to the kitchen, ask what relation it is asking you to hold — and notice that the holding is yours to do. The characters never get to.