Antiviral (2012)
Horror | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline: What If You Could Feel Like They Do ...

Inject some celebrity into your life Celebrity obsession has reached an all-time high, with the public now clamoring to be infected with the same diseases their idols carry. At the Lucas Clinic, Syd March sells injections of live viruses to those fans who can afford it. But Syd also has a black market trade in illness, selling viruses smuggled in his own body to piracy groups. After super sensation Hannah Geist reveals a new disease she carries, Syd is quick to capitalize on the opportunity and inject himself with some of Hannah's blood. When Hannah dies a few days later, Syd suddenly becomes the target of rival clinics and collectors and as the virus begins to destroy Syd's body, he must find a way to rid himself of it before he suffers the same fate as Hannah. A chilling look at obsession in all its most twisted forms, Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral is a masterpiece of biological horror and a searing indictment of celebrity culture run amok.

Storyline: Syd March is an employee at a clinic that sells injections of live viruses harvested from sick celebrities to obsessed fans. Biological communion - for a price. Syd also supplies illegal samples of these viruses to piracy groups, smuggling them from the clinic in his own body. When he becomes infected with the disease that kills super sensation Hannah Geist, Syd becomes a target for collectors and rabid fans. He must unravel the mystery surrounding her death before he suffers the same fate. Written by Rhombus Media

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Casey Broadwater on August 15, 2013 -- The wormy apple doesn't fall far from the twisted tree. As much as I'd like to take Antiviral entirely on its own merits, it's impossible not to mention that the film's director, Brandon Cronenberg, is the son of that other filmmaking Cronenberg—David—the horror maestro behind Rabid and Shivers, Scanners and Videodrome, The Fly and Naked Lunch. The elder Cronenberg made a career out of grossing us out with the viral and the venereal, madness and mutations, and his progeny—from this first glance—seems to share these same grisly preoccupations. Were Antiviral shot in the late 1970s, it would fit easily in papa Cronenberg's inflamed, seeping oeuvre. It's bloody, body-obsessed, and it manages to build a modestly effective, not-so-distant-future dystopian sci-fi world on a seriously meager budget.

If only it were better. The project started as a short film that had the unexpected opportunity to be expanded into a feature, and like many shorts gone supersized, it seems both padded and empty, with a decent premise but a story that drags on to unnecessary lengths. We might say it suffers from the same high-concept, low-energy fatigue that plagued David Cronenberg's early effort Crimes of the Future, which film critic Kim Newman called "boring and interesting at the same time." That's Antiviral—at times unbearably dull, but strangely fascinating too.

Antiviral envisions a world where obsession with celebrity has reached its (il)logical extreme. No longer content with tabloid magazines and 24- hour TV coverage, the fame-infatuated public has found a new, literally sick way of living vicariously through the stars. For a price, the most devoted fans can visit the Lucas Clinic, where they're injected with illnesses harvested directly from their favorite actors, actresses, and pop idols. Want a young glitterati member's particular strain of herpes simplex shot directly into your upper lip? No problem, so long as you have the cash.

In Antiviral, diseases have replaced autographs as the coveted celebrity collectible, and people go to the gaunt, sickly-looking Syd March (X- Men: First Class' Caleb Landry Jones) to get them. Syd is a sales associate at the Lucas Clinic, responsible for helping customers pick out viral and bacterial infections. What his boss doesn't know, however, is that Syd is also running a black market celebrity disease pirating operation out of his stark white apartment. (Like most sci-fi dystopias, this one too is drained of color.) At the office, Syd injects himself with whatever the hot new illness is, and when he gets home, he pulls some of his blood and gets to work on replicating the disease, using a machine that can override the Lucas Clinic's stringent copy protection technology. It's like Digital Rights Management—DRM—but just swap out "digital" with "disease."

If you're guessing that Syd's infection stealing eventually catches up with him—in more ways than one—then you're far ahead of Antiviral's simultaneously simple and obtuse plot. Syd's troubles start when he injects himself with the blood of the apparently famous-for-being-famous Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), the celebrity "face" of the Lucas Clinic, who is suffering from a mysterious sickness that promises to be huge in the underground disease trade. Whatever it is, it unexpectedly turns out to be lethal, spurring Syd on a race against his biological clock to find a cure. The progressively symptomatic Syd is also pursued by Levine (James Cade), the leader of a rival piracy group, and the obsessive Dr. Abendroth, Hannah's personal physician, played by the legendary Malcolm McDowell. Inevitably, blood is shed, needles prick skin, and—apropos of the Cronenberg family name— bodies are grotesquely mutated.

Antiviral operates on a novel premise and has a few good visual ideas—including lots of Kubrickian single-perspective symmetry—but Cronenberg the younger is ultimately a bit too obvious in his indictment of celebrity culture. The film might've been more successful as a sci-fi satire along the lines of Brazil; instead, bled entirely of comedy, it seems to take itself far too seriously, a problem that's exacerbated by an unjustifiably long runtime. Antiviral is somnambulantly paced, shambling through a nearly action-free series of events that aren't quite enough to sustain a feature-length film. An even more detrimental problem is the fact that, as a protagonist, Syd is a total blank. We know nothing about him. His mood rarely changes. He's not so much a character as a cipher. To some extent, this plays into the film's whole antiseptic vibe—the white walls, the gleaming lights, the featureless rooms—but it gets tiring somewhere around the 60-minute mark. This isn't to say that Calab Landry Jones isn't terrific in the role—he's great, and I think he has a lot of potential as a "cult" actor—but more that the role itself is severely underwritten, much like the film as a whole.

First time director Brandon Cronenberg has set off in his father David's footsteps, creating a high-concept piece of body-horror that seeks to disturb mentally as much as it does viscerally. There are definitely some interesting ideas here—and Antiviral does look fantastic, with a stark white and red color palette—but the film unfortunately suffers from an incurable case of poor pacing, sleepwalking through a story that's more padded than action-packed. (It's no surprise to learn the movie was expanded from a short; it could stand to be cut back by a good 20 minutes.) Still, IFC's Blu- ray release is currently selling for a cut-rate price on Amazon, so if you're looking for some new dystopian sci-fi and are willing to value cool visuals over a compelling plot, Antiviral might be worth your time.

[CSW] -2.4- When they say that this is a Horror / Sci-Fi / Thriller they were right but… This movie had great acting, strong visual, an incredibly interesting and unique story, but I failed to fully understand what was going on the whole time, but I think that's the point. It spun in the direction of corporate and underworld greed and involvement all catering to a need that was only real in the minds of delusional people. This made the movie, in my estimation, itself delusional. It's a bit frustrating when you can tell the movie could have been stunning but just doesn't quite connect. Even still, there certainly some interesting (and creepy) visuals featured and it is interesting and evocative. Watch this if you want to see a movie unlike any other you've seen before.
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.

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