Film Review: "Antiviral" (2012).

"What If You Could Feel Like They Do ..." This is Antiviral. This Canadian-French science fiction horror film written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg. The film centres on Syd March, 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.

Cronenberg has stated that the genesis of the film was a viral infection he once had. More precisely, the "central idea came to him in a fever dream during a bout of illness." Cronenberg elaborated, "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." It was further shaped when he saw an interview Sarah Michelle Gellar did on Jimmy Kimmel Live!; what struck him was when "she said she was sick and if she sneezed she'd infect the whole audience, and everyone just started cheering." By early November 2011, Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, and Malcolm McDowell were cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced, and wrapped in early December. Filming took place in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. During production, Gadon and Jones both decided not to meet or rehearse prior to the filming of the hotel room scene where Syd takes a sample of Hannah Geist's blood. They both felt it would help preserve the separation of the characters within the story.

The film stars Jones, Gadon, and McDowell. Tour de force performances were given by the cast, where each of them gave a sharply authentic edge.

Visually audacious, disorienting, and just plain weird, like his father's 1983 body horror classic Videodrome, Antiviral's musings on technology, entertainment, and politics still feel fresh today. It is a perfect example of body horror. The film is a radical look at celebrity culture, celebrity obsession, and the increasingly violent state of celebrity and entertainment at a time when such subjects aren't up for cultural debate. The film shows us a world of our making should we continue a dangerous relationship with celebrity in its various forms, the images it puts into our brains. The film envisions a coming world of celebrity addiction.

Simon says Antiviral receives: