Directed by Brandon Cronenberg. Starring Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Malcolm McDowell, Douglas Smith, Joe Pingue, Nicholas Campbell 15 cert, Light House, Dublin, 103 min
If the director of this creepy, somewhat disordered body horror were named Boris O’Houlihan, he would still find his film compared with early pieces by David Cronenberg. The setting is a drab, antiseptic version of Toronto. The action involves defiled flesh and the vomiting of blood. The budget looks to have been only marginally more generous than that on old Cronenberg films such as Rabid and Shivers.
Brandon Cronenberg, David’s son, has clearly felt no need to impose aesthetic barriers between himself and the older film-maker. This is not altogether a bad thing. Brandon undoubtedly has a (perhaps genetic) gift for exploiting biological unpleasantness.
Antiviral imagines a future in which obsession with celebrity has reached such an unhinged state that punters pay to have themselves infected with their idols’ diseases. The viruses are altered in order to stop them becoming infectious. One could, happily enjoy, say, Peter André’s stomach flu without fearing it will spread to your dependants.
Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), an employee of the main virus supplier, makes extra bucks by infecting himself with valuable ailments, sneaking home and flogging his own infected tissue. Then, on a particularly grim day, one of his celebrity sources dies. “Eugh!” hardly covers it.
The horrible high concept can’t be faulted. Cronenberg Jr has merged queasy truths about infectious diseases (the intimacy they grant to other people’s bodies) and depressing revelations about modern celebrity (its rampant trivialness) into a coolly cynical pulp satire. Jones is impressively creepy as the pale, wasted protagonist. Like his father before him, Brandon makes a virtue of the budgetary restraints: Antiviral’s rough textures are, in themselves, somewhat alienating.
Unfortunately, the plot is a total mess. It’s not that it doesn’t add up (though it might not), but there’s simply that there is far too much of it. Various uninteresting subplots involving conspiracies and shop-front gangsters have been tacked on to inflate a tidy pitch into a slightly baggy finished product.
Promising stuff, nonetheless.
