“Eye of the Storm” is a Taiwanese disaster movie built around a pandemic and set inside a hospital.

The coronavirus of this outbreak was SARS –Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome — which burst out of Asia in the spring of 2003. But the responses to a deadly, little-known virus will be familiar to anyone who lived through the COVID shutdown, especially health care workers. A quarantine generates responses that range from dutiful resignation to panic and cowardice.

The characters and situations will be familiar to anybody who’s watched a disaster movie or two, and caught a few episodes of “ER” “Gray’s Anatomy” or their clones.

There are young lovers (Chloe Xiang, Jing-Hua Tseng) barely past the “crush” stage but forced to make major life decisions and deal with terrible losses.

A taxi driver (Yung-Cheng Chang) trapped in the locked-down Taipei hospital has to take on the responsibility of a small child whose nurse/mother was one of the first to get sick.

A cynical reporter (Hsueh Shih-ling) trapped with them, tries to find out how many SARS cases, how they’re being treated and how the disease got into the hospital and the country, and there’s a narcissistic, dismissive surgeon (Po-Chieh Wang) forced to do his duty and stay on the job despite family demands, and just curious enough to help that pesky reporter track down the history of this virus getting in.

The film echoes much of what we saw in the early days of COVID-19, a quarantined hospital with the sick, the dying and the trapped — hanging homemade banners about their plight out the window — even as it follows medical drama/disaster movie formulas.

Dr, Xia (Wang) is an aloof surgeon determined to cut out of work early to make it to his daughter’s birthday party. He is curt with callers who want to transfer a patient “too old” for him to treat to their hospital, to staff who hit him with question after question as he’s dashing for the door, to every caller on his constantly-ringing phone, including his wife.

He browbeats the cabbie who “just got off duty” to drive him home, and when he’s summoned to another emergency surgery during what’s left of his shift, he gets the guy to turn around. Xia isn’t moved by the cabbie’s compassion and doesn’t thank the nurse who hands him the belongings the cabbie rushed into the hospital to drop off ,which the doctor had left in his taxi.

A lost little girl, almost trampled as the facility is thrown into lockdown, becomes the cabbie’s next mission. Xia? He’s stuck here doing his job

The lovers may be heading in different directions. Ang’s a male nurse interviewing with “Doctors Without Borders” in Hong Kong. Petite Dr. Lee is ready to turn clingy over that.

And the reporter, always whipping out a camcorder to “document” a hospital whose SARS cases he reported before they did (“educated guess”) is now stuck with a surgeon adamant about not being photographed, but maybe willing to help find the truth that those “pretentious bastards who hide in meeting rooms” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) are covering up, or too inept to recognize.

Director Chun-yang Lin (“The World Between Us”) keeps things moving, although suspense is in short supply. The performances are more adequate than moving.

The inclusion of lots of bloody ER and surgery scenes, complete with background “coughing,” set the story on familiar, foreshadowed ground.

Xiang has maybe the best acting moment in the picture, capturing a bit of human nature not typically covered in tales of hospital heroics during COVID. A furious Dr. Lee, tiny little thing that she is, leaves behind her latest attempted resuscitation to pound on doors on her hospital wing, raging at staff hiding in locked rooms to “stop being cowards,” to come out and “do your jobs!”

It’s all standard-issue medical drama material, with SARS as the “disaster movie” wild card, the instigating action that sets our soap operatic story in motion. And it’s handled with skill, speed and dollops of drama and compassion.

Rating: TV-14, graphic surgery footage

Cast: Po-Chieh Wang, Chloe Xiang, Jing-Hua Tseng, Yung-Cheng Chang and Hsueh Shih-ling

Credits: Directed by Chun-yang Lin, scripted by Tsun-Han Liu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58