SALON

Tuesday, Apr 9, 2013 7:05 PM UTC

“Antiviral”: New perversity from a new Cronenberg

Is Brandon Cronenberg's icy, nightmarish "Antiviral" a tribute to his dad's '70s films, or an Oedipal assault?

By

Topics: Movies, Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy, David Cronenberg, Brandon Cronenberg, Antiviral, Our Picks, Our Picks: Movies,

Caleb Landry Jones in "Antiviral"

With its clinical, anonymous interiors, its icily sardonic manner and its vision of a profoundly disordered human future in which celebrity worship merges with cutting-edge biotechnology, the Canadian horror-thriller “Antiviral” would remind viewers of David Cronenberg’s early films no matter who had directed it. But since it’s the debut feature from writer and director Brandon Cronenberg, David’s son, the comparison immediately gets complicated. I’m honestly not sure whether it’s ingenious or foolhardy of the younger Cronenberg to go right at his dad’s legacy this way – quite likely it’s both. At any rate, he’s created an interesting decoding problem for viewers, along with an intriguing low-budget chiller that deserves to be seen on its own terms.

Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones of the TV series “Friday Night Lights”) is a pallid, cherubic young man nearly always seen in a ponytail and an undertaker’s suit who sells a bizarre commodity: live infectious virus harvested from diseased celebrities. In pushing his lab’s latest concoction, a flu bug garnered from an ice-blond cover girl called Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), he purrs to a potential client: “Perfect, isn’t she. She gives me shivers.” Now, OK – did that line just come out that way, in Cronenberg’s script, or is he winking at his dad’s first hit, the 1975 sexual-parasite saga “Shivers” (known to American viewers as “They Came From Within”)? And should we understand all the echoes of and allusions to David Cronenberg’s movies in “Antiviral” – I can strongly feel “Rabid,” “Videodrome” and “eXistenZ,” at the very least – as a work of collaboration and tribute or an Oedipal assault?

Here are a couple of things to make clear: This isn’t a David Cronenberg film by proxy, no matter how much some people want to read it that way. His name appears nowhere in the credits, and none of his normal crew members worked on the film. (The one Cronenberg crossover I can see is that Sarah Gadon played Robert Pattinson’s on-screen wife in “Cosmopolis,” David’s last film.) Furthermore, while the subject matter and setting of “Antiviral” are right smack in the middle of late-‘70s Cronenbergian “body horror” territory, Brandon has a very different sensibility from his father. There are only a few dry traces of the anarchic humor often found in David’s early films, and the combustible blend of erotic fear and desire is likewise absent. “Antiviral” is a cool, voyeuristic film structured like a 1950s American crime drama, with an impassive and androgynous protagonist who does what he must to survive but reveals as little as possible.

At first the central metaphor at work in “Antiviral” – celebrity culture rendered as a contagious disease and even a cannibal cult – feels both overly obvious and overly intellectual, as if the screenplay emerged from a bout of reading Michel Foucault. But by stubbornly sticking with it and pushing it to ludicrous extremes, Cronenberg achieves a kind of heightened reality that does not resemble the real world but possesses its own internal logic. In a world where people pay to be infected with celebrity herpes, it makes sense that water-cooler gossip focuses on the burning question of whether Hannah Geist was born without a vulva and requires custom-made underwear, and that TV news shows carry breathless updates on the condition of supermodel Aria Noble’s anus. Muscle tissue taken from Aria and Hannah is even grown in labs, then sliced up and sold as three-ounce steaks in special celebrity butcher shops. (It looks a little like whale blubber or whipped Styrofoam, but Syd eats it without complaint.)

While the plot of “Antiviral” involves a complicated skein of double-dealing and skulduggery worthy of film noir, it’s arguably a lot less important or interesting than the dystopian setting or the overtly Cronenbergian dream sequences in which Syd imagines himself merging with the dying Hannah or turning into a machine. (The outstanding cinematography is by Karim Hussain.) Syd has been smuggling virus cultures out of the lab in his own body and reselling them to sinister characters on the black market, but in the process has sickened himself with a genetically engineered Hannah Geist bug that is both incurable and extremely valuable. So he’s simultaneously the hero of the story and its MacGuffin, since both the shadowy villains and the entourage around the dead or dying Hannah want what’s in his bloodstream.

How high is the gross-out factor, and the level of postmodern grad-school self-referentiality? Pretty doggone high; whenever Syd’s not hobbling around on a cane trying to solve the mystery, he’s getting tied down to have needles jammed into him or tissue samples extracted. And somewhere there must exist an outtake reel of bloody spit-takes that didn’t make it into the finished movie; I look forward to seeing it on YouTube any day now. Rather than seeing “Antiviral” as David Cronenberg’s covert return to his horror-movie roots, or as an unsatisfactory attempt by his son to replicate the creepazoid magic of years gone past, I’d rather understand it as something new. Brandon Cronenberg clearly understands that he has to deal with the legacy of his last name, and “Antiviral” feels to me like a perverse act of exorcism, half tribute and half cleansing ritual. He has feasted on the flesh and infected himself with the disease; what will he do next?

“Antiviral” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York, with other cities to follow. It’s also available this week on-demand from cable, satellite and online providers.

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • This photo. President Barack Obama has a laugh during the unveiling of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Tx., Thursday. Former first lady Barbara Bush, who candidly admitted this week we've had enough Bushes in the White House, is unamused.
    Reuters/Jason Reed

  • Rescue workers converge Wednesday in Savar, Bangladesh, where the collapse of a garment building killed more than 300. Factory owners had ignored police orders to vacate the work site the day before.
    AP/A.M. Ahad

  • Police gather Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to honor campus officer Sean Collier, who was allegedly killed in a shootout with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects last week.
    AP/Elise Amendola

  • Police tape closes the site of a car bomb that targeted the French embassy in Libya Tuesday. The explosion wounded two French guards and caused extensive damage to Tripoli's upscale al-Andalus neighborhood.
    AP/Abdul Majeed Forjani

  • Protestors rage outside the residence of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Sunday following the rape of a 5-year-old girl in New Delhi. The girl was allegedly kidnapped and tortured before being abandoned in a locked room for two days.
    AP/Manish Swarup

  • Clarksville, Mo., residents sit in a life boat Monday after a Mississippi River flooding, the 13th worst on record.
    AP/Jeff Roberson

  • Workers pause Wednesday for a memorial service at the site of the West, Tx., fertilizer plant explosion, which killed 14 people and left a crater more than 90 feet wide.
    AP/The San Antonio Express-News, Tom Reel

  • Aerial footage of the devastation following a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in China's Sichuan province last Saturday. At least 180 people were killed and as many as 11,000 injured in the quake.
    AP/Liu Yinghua

  • On Wednesday, Hazmat-suited federal authorities search a martial arts studio in Tupelo, Miss., once operated by Everett Dutschke, the newest lead in the increasingly twisty ricin case. Last week, President Barack Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker, R.-Miss., and a Mississippi judge were each sent letters laced with the deadly poison.
    AP/Rogelio V. Solis

  • The lighting of Freedom Hall at the George W. Bush Presidential Center Thursday is celebrated with (what else but) red, white and blue fireworks.
    AP/David J. Phillip

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 4 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Would we give up burgers to stop climate change? New study suggests if we reduce our intake of animal products by 25%, we can halt climate change
621 points622 points | 262 comments
vote
Facebook has been used to find ex-lovers, childhood BFFs or the one who got away. He used it to find the guy who, without his consent, made him his drug mule.
241 points242 points | 22 comments
vote
“This could be a career ender for Michele Bachmann”
143 points144 points | 58 comments
vote
Poll: 3 in 10 voters say “armed revolution might be necessary” - 29% say they believe they'll have to act "in order to protect our liberties" in the next few years
46 points47 points | 16 comments
vote
Capitalism, not feminism, killed home cooking–and fixing our broken food system is gonna take a lot more than some privileged women embracing “new domesticity”
33 points34 points | 19 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: "The Shelter Cycle": Raised in a cult

Recommendations