Antiviral (2012)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Empire Magazine list

 

#99 Antiviral (2012)

 

Among the most sophisticated Directors to come out of SF,F&H is Canadian David Cronenberg. His son, Brandon, who is also Canada-based, followed him into the field of Direction, and Brandon’s work clearly shows his father’s influence. “Antiviral” is Brandon’s first feature.

 

David all-but-invented the SF,F&H sub-genre Body Horror which can be defined as the graphic depiction of the destruction or degeneration of a human body its central theme – and in that definition, “theme” is the most important word, because Body Horror is not the same thing as merely being gory; it is idea-driven, linking the poisoning, infection, mutation, decay and/or repulsion of the human body to the undermining of an individual’s identity/morality, the family unit, or the structures of the society as a whole. David’s Body Horror films are notoriously disgusting, but generally had fewer gore-scenes than, for example, a Slasher Movie, though these few scenes prove to be more intense and disturbing than what anyone else had to offer during the sub-genre’s heyday of the 1970s – 80s. Hell, one of his best, “Dead Ringers” (1988), has essentially no gore at all.

 

Brandon has embraced his father’s heritage of Body Horror. Though Brandon embraced greater frequency in gross-outs than most of his father’s work, he shared his father’s skill at making the ideas what was truly flesh-crawling. Thematically, “Antiviral” is most similar to David’s “Videodrome” (1983) especially in that it's a Surrealist film that deceptively follows the rules of a more conventional Conspiracy Thriller. It brutally satirizes a perceived detachment from real experience that seems to be subverting the whole of our civilization, choosing to demonstrate it through grotesque farce of Celebrity Cultism. It eschews the obvious approaches to this idea (example, “Videodrome’s” use of VR technology) but instead describes a world where obsessed fans have created a thriving market for pathogens extracted from the bodies of pop- and movie-stars so the fans can share the experience of their idol’s illnesses. Demonstrating the unhealthiness of obsession by self-infection of literal diseases is not exactly subtle, but Brandon is also blessed with his father’s analytical, even forensic, story-telling style, keeping the simple and sick parable from ever becoming pedantic.

 

It’s an expansion of Brandon’s much admired student film, “Broken Tulips” (2008, I haven’t seen it), and its opening scene is essentially a recreation of the original five-minute-short. Edward Porris (Douglas Smith here, Ryan Kelly in the original) arrives at his appointment at the Lucas Clinic to get a graphicly-depicted injection in his lips of the herpes virus harvested from his favorite star, Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon). The injection is graphically depicted of course, or as said Brandon in an interview, “If you're discussing disease as a sex metaphor, there has to be penetration!”

 

Edward disappears from the film after that, but Hannah is one of the leads. An interesting story-telling strategy here is that even as she becomes a lead, Hannah has only a handful of scenes, frequently silent and later comatose, but her image is everywhere. We learn almost nothing about this beautiful woman except her medical information and that that people are obsessed with her. We don’t even learn why she is famous.

 

Our main character is a mid-level employee of the clinic, Syd March (Caleb Landry-Jones) who is also a Corporate Spy with Organized Crime connections. You see, in order to maintain a competitive edge, the clinic alters each celebrity disease sample so it is non-contagious. Syd gets a hold of pre-modified samples, infects himself, and then smuggles it out of the secured facility in his own body. He then sells the diseases in his blood to a Mobster named Arvid (Joe Pingue) whose legit-front for his Black-Market business is, appropriately, a butcher shop.

 

Hannah’s pathogens are the clinic’s most lucrative contract, but her latest ailment proves more dangerous than originally recognized, and key to an obscure assassination plot.  Now Hannah is dying and Syd is developing unsightly lesions and vomiting chocolate-colored blood while being hunted by his Criminal rivals and even more dangerous, and more shadowy, Bad Guys.

 

Director Brandon built a convincing Near-Future world almost entirely without SF props. All futuristic items are simple, and tied directly to the central theme, so no robots, flying cars, or holograms. Instead, we learn the butcher Arvid fills his shop with cuts of meat cloned from celebrity tissue, so you can literally consume your favorite star; we’re shown a TV network devoted to stars’ body parts, with an emphasis on crotch photos and colonoscopy footage; and crazy Dr. Abenroth (Malcom McDowell) displays skin-grafts on his arm from four different people.

 

This is a fascinating, but seriously flawed film. The best performance comes from Landry-Jones; his thin, frame, awkward body mechanics, and pale, androgenous face, give you much of what you need to know about Syd even before he speaks. Both a moral and physical weakling, he’s a kind of Vampire, but not a Christopher-Lee-type, his Vampirism is a disease that was sucking away at him even before he contracts Hannah’s ailment; his Vampirism is more akin to the parasitism of a junkie than a Dracula. Brandon stated, “I kind of wanted a character who seemed to be a good window into that world, position themselves as having this sort of distance. At the end, we figure out he’s motivated by the same obsessive impulses, and I guess I was thinking that celebrity culture is something easy to step back from and find extremely grotesque and make fun of, and I do, but at the same time, we’re sort of defined by the environment and can’t help but be affected by it." Syd, lacking family and friends, has no connections to anyone, even his growing his obsession with Hannah is from afar. This works thematically, but not necessarily dramatically.

 

Similarly, Hannah is a cipher, inhibiting Gadon’s performance. Gadon is a fine actress, apparently introduced to Brandon by his dad (she starred in David’s “Dangerous Method” (2011) and “Cosmopolis” (2012), but again, though the approach was thematically on-target, it’s dramatically distancing.

 

The rest of the cast are not nearly as significant, so though some are very funny, like Pingue as bullying Arvid or McDowell as highly articulate and self-deluding Dr. Abendroth, but there isn’t enough of any of them to save this film from cold detachment.

 

That detachment is often a feature of David’s films, but there the feature is generally deceptive façade. David draws his characters with great depth and care, and drew out extraordinary performances from his actors in most of his films. The work of Samantha Eggar (“The Brood” (1979)), Michael Ironside (“Scanners” (1981)), James Woods (“Videodrome”), Christopher Walken (“The Dead Zone” (1983)), Jeff Goldblum (“The Fly” (1986)), Jeremy Irons (“Dead Ringers”), James Spader (“Crash” (1996)), Jennifer Jason Leigh (“eXistenZ” (1999)), Ralph Fiennes (“Spider” (2002)), Viggo Mortensen (“A History of Violence” (2002) and “Eastern Promises” (2007)) were all considered “career best” by critic Ryan Lambie. David’s films rarely seem “studied” in the pejorative sense, instead, they carefully study people.

 

Brandon, at least in this first feature, hasn’t quite achieve that yet, so “Antiviral” falls short on the audience’s character investment. Brian D. Johnson observed that the film is, “more essay than drama, lacks the subversive glimmers of warmth and wit that make David’s films so deliciously palatable, no matter how dire they get.”

Despite this, the ideas are clearly presented and quite original. The final image is stunningly creepy. And it certainly has a memorable look. Cinematographer Karim Hussain worked digitally (both David and Brandon believe film is dead, an attitude probably influenced by the fact that film can’t even be processed in Canada anymore) and the film’s most important color, white, becomes luminous without detracting from the crispness of any object or person. Production Designer Arvinder Greywal (who had worked with David in the past) stressed the color contrasts, notably Syd’s black attire and vomit vs the oppressively sterile white environments.

 

The harshest review I found was from Paul Freitag-Fey, “The problem is that it’s the cinematic equivalent of a museum piece – amazing to look at and exquisitely polished, but ultimately untouchable and completely unrelatable.”  Stephen Garrett, who praised the production values while scolding the underdeveloped characters, and ultimately concluded, “But boy, do those gory ideas and notions linger in the mind. For real.”

 

The story initially occurred to Brandon while he was sick with fever, "I was delirious and was obsessing over the physicality of illness, the fact that there was something in my body and in my cells that had come from someone else's body, and I started to think there was a weird intimacy to that connection.

 

“And afterwards I tried to think of a character who would see a disease that way and I thought: a celebrity-obsessed fan.

 

"Celebrity culture is completely bodily obsessed — Who has the most cellulite? Who has fungus feet? — Celebrity culture completely fetishizes the body and so I thought the film should also fetishize the body, in a very grotesque way."

 

He also recalled an episode of the “Jimmy Kimmel Show” that featured Actress Sarah Michelle Gellar, "she said she was sick and if she sneezed, she'd infect the whole audience, and everyone just started cheering.”

This is not the only real-world incident that seems to buttress the uber-bizarro premise. In 1943 Actress Gene Tierney was pregnant when an obsessed fan snuck out of rubella quarantine to get her autograph at a Hollywood Canteen event; Tierney's child was born with disabilities which triggered severe depression in Tierney. In 1984, while Princess Diana was pregnant with her second child, there was a public debate if this might inspire a “baby-boom” that would over-tax England’s Public Health Care and Education Systems. In 2011, a rotten tooth of the late John Lennon sold at auction for $31,000.

Both farther and son had films, not only premiering, but featured, as an Official Selection, at Cannes 2012 (Brandon’s “Antiviral” and David’s “Cosmopolis”). Have a celebrity father clearly helped Brandon regarding that, as it took David 20 years to achieve the same. This put Brandon under a microscope or, as Producer Niv Fichman observed, “If the film didn’t stand up, he’d be crucified.”

 

Well, he certainly faced nay-sayers, but also those of appreciated it and recognized the distinctions between the two Directors. Actress Gadon remarked, “Brandon has all the intellect and darkness of his father, yet there is a sensitivity that exists in him in this moment in time … a sensitivity that surfaces in his filmmaking. It’s what allowed him to get to the heart of the beautifully twisted but fragile closeness we have with celebrities."

 

Then, of course, there were those like Jason Adams, who like me, misses David’s Body Horror films, “Papa's gone off to make Serious Movies …  leaving some space for Jr., who no doubt learned all about the susceptibilities of the weakest flesh while bouncing on his daddy's knee, to swoop in.” And elsewhere, “[I]t's hard to review because so much of me wants to pretend ‘Ooh hey look we've got Cronenberg back!’ … I wonder how much wiggle room I'd give it just because it's grooving on that vintage vibe his daddy spun into such awesome, gruesome gold.”

 

Regarding David’s influence, Brandon said this, "I don't have enough distance from his work to be influenced by it in the way that I think people usually mean … He's my father, so I think I've been influenced by him that way: we share genes, I grew up around him, we have a very good relationship. As a filmmaker? Maybe being around it, but not as a filmmaker in the usual sense."

 

Though the film wasn’t successfully financially, it was respected enough that he was able to find the financing for his next feature.

 

Trailer:

CIFF (2012) Antiviral Official Trailer - Brandon Cronenberg Movie HD - YouTube