He and his team are satisfied that the virus is not airborne, but they have reckoned without that monkey, which sparks a calamitous chain of events. Petersen topples the dominoes with military precision: the route from infection to death is so lovingly executed, you can almost forget he’s depicting the end of the world as we know it.
This relish lifts the film whenever it gets bogged down in science or gloom. The virus arrives in Cedar Creek, California, from Zare, via an infected monkey. Dustin Hoffman is Sam Daniels, a virologist alerted to the disease as it hits the African rain forest. Wolfgang Petersen directs so fast you swallow most anything, even that a squirt like Hoffman could be assigned the task of saving mankind. In Outbreak, thousands of people succumb to a vicious disease which first reddens your face, as though you’ve been scrubbed with a loofah, then renders you with the complexion of a pizza junkie Then you die. Auden writes: “Oh let not time deceive you, you cannot conquer time”.

Here, time magically does seem to stop for a perfect evanescent moment because their future – whether they’ll meet again – hangs in the balance.n Both films open tomorrow. Before Sunrise takes off in the opposite direction: its couple meets in Scene One, and the film builds up to their parting. In structure, though not in tone, it more closely resembles a melodrama like Brief Encounter. It sends up the genre’s stock belief in destiny too, in the daft figure of a fortune-teller who “reads” a string of vague generalities from Delpy’s palm.

“Don’t forget: you are stardust,” she adds as her parting shot with a mincing little dance.Fate – or its absence – is a favourite theme of Linklater’s: in the first scene of his first film, he appeared in a cameo role as a philosophical cab passenger spinning the theory that, like Dorothy picking which path to go down in The Wizard of Oz, we face in our lives a series of bifurcating choices which gradually close down our options. “We’re trapped in one reality,” his character says, lightly regretting all the parallel universes that might have been.That’s the sceptical, faintly bittersweet conclusion of the new film: the ideal relationship is one that hasn’t been consolidated yet – in a sharp twist, it’s the bickering between a long-married couple which brings the characters together. It’s a huge vote of confidence in the actors, who respond magnificently.It is a staple of romantic comedy to have two twin souls in search of each other uniting happily ever after in the final reel: a clich as seen in Sleepless in Seattle, Four Weddings, Only You and Love Affair (the forthcoming Beatty-Bening remake of An Affair to Remember) to take but four recent examples. Another long scene in a tram is shot in a single, full-on close-up which lasts at least five minutes.