76 Days

If the title 76 Days reminds you of the zombie film 28 Days, you're on to something. This harrowing documentary traces the course of the COVID-19 pandemic within four hospitals during a 76-day lockdown at the disease's epicenter in Wuhan, China, and some early scenes — such as sick people clamoring at a locked door — are reminiscent of a horror film. Except this is scarier: As the United States approaches a winter in which the virus appears to be spreading unchecked, the crowding and chaos in Wuhan's wards may be a glimpse of our immediate future.

The health care workers here are all shrouded head to toe in protective suits, with gloves, booties, masks, and face shields, so don't expect to be able to tell who's who, or even which hospital is which. For once, though, such details don't much matter. The point of the film is to put viewers in the middle of the disaster — which it certainly does — and the health-care response is less about individual heroics than it is about a remarkable solidarity of shared resolve.

It’s also remarkable that 76 Days even exists. The footage was shot by two of the film's co-directors in Wuhan, who uploaded their video to the cloud daily and illegally by circumventing the government's Great Firewall (intended to constrict Internet access). The movie was then assembled by co-director Hao Wu, a Chinese filmmaker living in New York.

It's an amazingly timely and gripping document, and Wu and his collaborators capture not just the overarching crisis but also moving human moments: exhausted workers napping in the hall, telephone calls to loved ones, a worker disinfecting items from a box of mobile phones and ID cards left behind by the dead.

Some patients — one of them a woman about to give birth — are followed to give the film some continuity and narrative, but the impact of the personal stories is secondary to the impression of an unparalleled collective effort. It makes one wonder whether egocentric Americans will even be able to come close to this unity of mission when our time comes.

Grade: A-minus. Now streaming via the VIrtual Cinema program at FineArtsTheatre.com.

(Photo: MTV Documentary Films)