There aren’t many laugh-out-loud moments in Mariam Ghani’s documentary about our war on germs. But the sight of two British colonial hunters in former Ceylon bringing down a gigantic papier mâché mosquito is a highlight.
Ghani intercuts such public information films (a rich source of inadvertent comedy) with monster movies, documentaries, thrillers, newsreels and histology lab footage to tell the story of an abiding medical metaphor: the body as citadel, beset by germs.
