“The afterlife is getting extremely perverse.”
If my father were an incredibly renowned filmmaker and I, too, wanted to be a filmmaker, I would probably not choose to dive headfirst right into the same exact niche genre that my father had pioneered. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” criticisms would come too easily. Nevertheless, this is exactly what Brandon Cronenberg does in Antiviral, his feature debut, which has more than passing resemblance to the body horror classics his father made in the ‘70s and ‘80s (Videodrome, The Fly).
It’s an enervating and unnerving satire of celebrity culture, taking place in a sterile present-day hell in which famous personalities have pervaded the lives of the hoi polloi to a hideous degree—where consumers seek “biological communion” with stars and starlets via the transfusion of diseases. We already glamorize mental illness, why not physical illness too? Our guide through this cultural nadir is Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), a salesman/technician for one of a handful of companies whose business model involves harvesting viruses from sick celebrities, tinkering them into a non-contagious form, and then injecting them into fools for lots of money.
The human face is a powerful messenger. Our brains are attuned to its every nuance. The smallest shift in musculature can translate itself into complex non-verbal information so subtle, and communicated so quickly, that we often don’t even register it consciously.
Although Cronenberg isn’t exactly subtle with his social critique, he does offer a variety of gross iterations on it. In addition to the market for celebrity sickness, there are also shops that sell lab-grown meat made from celebrity muscle cells and a skin grafting trend that sees celeb skin placed on the body like tattoos. Background newscasts discuss a model’s “anus ordeal” while displaying crotch photos taken with a thermal camera.
We gradually encounter these perversions and others through offhand conversations and casual observation, and eventually they are smartly worked into a mystery-thriller that stems from Syd moonlighting as a mule for the black market propagation of celeb diseases. A carousel of minor illnesses swirling through his bloodstream keeps him in a perpetual state of debilitation, but when he smuggles blood from Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), her subsequent death throws his world into disarray, prompting a mad, dazed scramble to find a cure even as rogue actors seek to harvest the lucrative pathogen pulsing through his veins.
All of this is tied together by an atmosphere marked by a sterling filmic instinct. Cronenberg knows where to place his camera and when to cut, when to use static shots and symmetry vs. a handheld camera, when to be elegant vs. when to be nasty, when to present realism vs. when to use slow motion and ambient music, when to shift from black comedic satire to straight up thriller. Of course, credit for these achievements is due to his many collaborators—cinematographer Karim Hussain, editor Matthew Hannam, composer E.C. Woodley, production designer Arvinder Grewal, and most importantly, Caleb Landry Jones, whose intense performance carries the entire film (even if his character is frustratingly opaque).
It’s only mildly thought-provoking—who among us doesn’t already realize that the average person has an unhealthy attachment to famous people?—but it’s not necessarily the end of the world if it’s more thrilling and sensuous (though not sexy) than deeply discomfiting. Ultimately, there is sufficient reason to suggest that Brandon Cronenberg is not just David Cronenberg–lite; that his work is worthy of attention on its own merit.