Rich Flu: when being loaded becomes a pre-existing condition (scifi trailer).

The trailer for Rich Flu has arrived, and it brings with it the sort of high-concept science fiction premise that makes one glance nervously at both the news and one’s Premium Bonds: what if a mysterious disease started killing the richest people on Earth?

Not the mildly comfortable. Not your uncle with three rental properties and a suspiciously shiny kitchen island. We are talking billionaires first, then millionaires, then everyone further down the golden escalator, until the one per cent find themselves less a ruling class and more a particularly anxious medical trial.

Directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, the Spanish filmmaker behind The Platform, Rich Flu appears to be another helping of social satire served with a rusty spoon. Where The Platform turned class, hunger and vertical living into one of Netflix’s nastier dinner parties, this one gives us a pandemic thriller in which money itself becomes the infection marker. Wealth is not merely vulgar. It is terminal.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead stars as Laura, whose career is reaching one of those bright, glass-walled peaks that in cinema usually means fate is already loitering outside the executive lift with a clipboard. As the disease spreads and the wealthy begin falling like badly diversified investment portfolios, society responds with the calm maturity for which humanity is famous. Panic erupts. Assets are dumped. Fortunes become liabilities. Suddenly, giving away money is not virtue-signalling, philanthropy or tax planning. It is basic survival.

There is a deliciously cruel neatness to the idea. For centuries, the rich have been able to buy their way out of inconvenience, discomfort and occasionally consequence. Rich Flu imagines a world where the cure for wealth may be poverty, and the only acceptable financial advice is, “Have you considered not owning a yacht?”

The cast is a pleasingly sturdy one. Winstead, well known to genre fans from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, 10 Cloverfield Lane and Ahsoka, brings a useful blend of steel and panic to this sort of material. Rafe Spall is on hand, along with Timothy Spall, Lorraine Bracco, Jonah Hauer-King and Dixie Egerickx, giving the whole thing the air of an international co-production that has gone rummaging through a very respectable casting cupboard.

The film, originally titled La fiebre de los ricos, premiered at Sitges in 2024 and was released in Spain in early 2025. It now seems to be making its way to English-speaking audiences under the kind of blunt title that needs no committee meeting. Rich Flu. Two words. Diagnosis complete.

Of course, the great danger with a premise this juicy is that it can sound like the best fake film inside another film. The idea is so sharp you can almost hear someone in a studio pitch meeting saying, “It’s Contagion, but for people who own islands.” Still, that is also why it feels worth a look. Science fiction has always been at its best when it takes the polite lies of society, wires them to a battery, and watches which institutions start smoking.

Here at SFcrowsnest magazine, we are naturally not endorsing any disease, even one with a suspiciously well-targeted interest in offshore accounts. But as a cinematic thought experiment, Rich Flu has the sort of wicked sparkle that makes speculative fiction feel freshly disinfected. It asks what happens when the world’s most insulated people discover that insulation is flammable.

The trailer suggests panic rooms, financial collapse, moral scrambling and the grim spectacle of very powerful people discovering that no one can hedge against mortality. It also poses the most important economic question of our age: if being rich could kill you, how quickly would the super-rich discover socialism?

Expect running, screaming, sudden acts of generosity, and the unusual sight of wealth being treated not as aspiration, but as a contagious rash. Rich Flu may yet prove to be more fever dream than masterpiece, but the concept alone has bite. And in an era when billionaires keep trying to escape the planet, the oceans, mortality and sometimes basic taxation, a film where money becomes the monster feels less like fantasy and more like a public health announcement from the Department of Irony.