Antiviral

Brandon Cronenberg – 2012 – Canada

Despite the half-hearted efforts of cast and crew to avoid mentioning the name of the filmmaker’s father, David Cronenberg, the elder auteur’s shadow looms large over his son’s debut feature.  This is unfortunate because it’s not really fair to the film or its director, but at the same time, Antiviral demands comparisons because of its subject matter, which is familiar terrain to anyone acquainted with the senior Cronenberg’s early films like Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977) and The Brood (1979).  I can only describe the result as Cronenberg-lite.  It’s certainly a good film in its own right, though.  Caleb Landry Jones – (looking vacuous and pallid like a Cronenberg hero should) – plays a sales rep for a company that sells celebrity viruses that fans can purchase and infect themselves with in order to feel closer to the stars they most admire.  He also periodically steals some to sell on the black market.  I enjoyed the bleak atmosphere and design of the film, which is blatantly Cronenbergian – (you can easily imagine Dead Ringers, 1988, or Crash, 1996, taking place in the same universe), as well as the more aggressively fantastic concepts, which is something that David Cronenberg himself has eased back from in the past couple decades.  It is science fiction and horror but without any of the trappings of genre films, except for the camera’s almost pornographic preoccupation with extreme close-ups of syringe needles penetrating skin.