By Ben Rowe
Antiviral is the feature film debut of Brandon Cronenberg, son of famed Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. Set in the near-future, this parable about celebrity worship depicts a society willing to pay to be injected with celebrities’ diseases just to feel closer to them. Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for the Lucas Clinic, which buys and sells these celebrity illnesses. However, Syd is also injecting himself with the diseases in order to sell them to piracy groups. What follows is a dark and disturbing tale that raises interesting questions about obsessions and idolizations.
The opening scenes of Antiviral establish a pattern of striking imagery, dense symbolism and nearly opaque characters that clearly set it in the paradigm of Canadian, federally-funded, sci-fi, body horror films. In other words, it quite clearly carries on the Cronenberg tradition. Indeed, Antiviral is very much in the style of the elder Cronenberg’s early works. It calls to mind Videodrome in particular, especially in the broad strokes — a morally ambiguous protagonist stumbles upon a hidden technology that affects a change in his identity, and ping-pongs in his allegiances between the sides of the conspiracy as the plot requires him to. Like Videodrome’s Max Renn, Syd lacks a discernible character of his own — when the plot needs him to be a parasite he’s a parasite, but then he’ll suddenly develop a set of virtuous morals. Sometimes he’s an ignorant puppet of larger forces, but at other times he’ll be the mastermind controlling them. He’s a Rorschach test for the audience in many ways, but as a character he is frustratingly inscrutable.
Antiviral spends much of its beginning primarily concerned with mood, worldbuilding, themes and symbolism, which is unsurprising. What is surprising, however, is that in the second act the movie begins to develop a plot. It spins a corporate conspiracy yarn that actually continues to hold up and make sense even as the film indulges in nightmare imagery and standard Cronenberg/Kafka twists and turns. Brandon has made a film extremely similar to his father’s style, but his story holds up better than some of his dad’s early work. This plotline, inaugurated by the entrance of Dr. Abendroth (Malcolm McDowell), manages to sustain the movie and give it forward momentum for the majority of its remaining minutes, even as it continues to meander along.
On a thematic level, Antiviral works very well. It is doggedly dedicated to its theme: the exploration of our parasitic relationship with celebrities. It draws its metaphors tighter and tighter until the final image of the film is essentially a literal representation of the central theme. On a character basis, however, the movie is unsatisfying and as a piece of entertainment it largely fails. The movie is interesting on an intellectual level — many film students could write a promising paper on it — but it fails to connect emotionally or viscerally.
The biggest question Antiviral raises, unfortunately, is not about any of its themes or content, but simply, “Why is Brandon Cronenberg so obviously riding his father’s coattails?” The film is so entirely in his father’s style that it would be easy to simply assume it is a product of the elder Cronenberg. Most celebrity offspring seek to distance themselves creatively from their parents, but Brandon is positioning himself to all but ascend to the body horror throne as Cronenberg 2.0. The name and content associations of the film probably made it easier to get Telefilm funding, but it disappoints any who might have hoped Brandon had something artistically unique to say. Perhaps next time the apple will fall a little further from the tree.