Antiviral
★★★★
(2012)
Brandon Cronenberg's debut feature is an assured jet black first effort. Harnessing his fathers need to deconstruct the inherent fears in our society and mash them together with a hefty dose of flesh piercing and bloodletting this film may be instantly compared to the master of body horror's early work - Rabid or Shivers perhaps - but there are plenty of new and interesting ideas to be found in Antiviral. The young director is far more assured in composition and style than his fresh-faced father was in his too, utilising a dreamy and enveloping score by E.C Woodley and shining symmetrical photography from the exceptionally talented Karim Hussain.
We're in a bright white celebrity obsessed future straight out of a toothpaste advert where an intense, clench-jawed Caleb Landry Jones plays Syd March, a virus wrangler in a boutique clinic who specialise in selling famous people's viruses to the public. But its his moonlighting work which will ultimately lead March in quite a bit of a mess involving a pretty nasty flu and the holy grail of celb-dom, Sarah Gadon's beautiful chilly blonde, Hannah Geist. There is some back alley espionage and the almost trappings of a paint by numbers paranoid thriller, including a staple cameo from Malcolm McDowell but the slick horror stays the course.
It is often scary of how much Cronenberg Jr. and Sr.'s work is linked in this 90 minutes. Antiviral contains elements of Videodrome, The Brood, and eXistenZ, the moulding of man to machine and the farming of body parts and cells but aside from the obvious sickly comparisons there is something uniquely cold and haunting about it all. Antiviral's punch comes from its smart deconstruction of how we treat our most famous faces, amping it up to a near hilarious level, with some news channels televising up-skirt paparazzi shots and heat sensing cameras to examine, in true Cronenberg family tradition, genital deformaties.
Sure we've all wanted to sit down to dinner with "so and so" but how about eating a steak engineered from "so and so"s muscle cells? Or paying good money for some of their very own facial herpes? If you've seen Charlie Brooker's excellent futuristic horror satire Black Mirror you'll be ready for the depressing view point Cronenberg presents; An idea so silly that every aspect of it reeks of a odd and desperate inevitability. Will it come to this? It's a sharp darkly funny and fantastically made film from an extremely fitting heir to the throne.
