Watching 76 Days, the new documentary on the initial coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan from the Chinese American filmmaker Hao Wu, feels a lot like reading poetry. Its stubborn refusal to offer larger context or even simple explanations of what is happening leaves the viewer with two paths: either a close line-by-line read of the material, picking apart every frame, or simply letting it wash over you in a sequence of deeply intimate but also strangely impersonal moments, from a son reprimanding his father on the phone for being a nuisance to the medics to health workers sterilizing the belongings of patients who recently died before giving them back to their families.
The title refers to the length of the lockdown in Wuhan, the city where the novel coronavirus is believed to have originated. This implies the film is about the lockdown itself, but it is not. The “fly on the wall”-style documentary shows vignettes from within the containment zone of a hospital in Wuhan, where the worst of the initial outbreak unfolded.
