Ten Days of Terror!: Antiviral

Film: Antiviral
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

In the documentary Trekkies, there’s a moment where someone who works at conventions talks about the time that he sold a class of the “Q virus,” a glass of water that actor John de Lancie drank from on a panel while he was extremely sick. Someone in the crowd bought the glass and immediately drank the water, knowing that it was likely he would catch whatever illness de Lancie had at the time. That kind of thinking is at the heart of Antiviral, a movie made by Brandon Cronenberg but that could have easily been made by his father David.

The basic conceit behind Antiviral is that in the future, the idea of celebrity worship has metastasized into something far more obsessive and destructive. One of the main ways in which this is expressed is in the dealing of viruses and pathogens that infect celebrities. So, it’s not just that you can get COVID just like Tom Hanks did. You can be injected with the exact strain of the virus that he had, harvested from his cells. You’re not just getting the same thing; it’s like he’s infected you himself.

Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for a company called the Lucas Clinic that has contracts with different celebrities to harvest their various illnesses. Those viruses, illnesses, and pathogens are then injected into paying customers to allow them to get closer to the focus of their obsession and attention. There are several such companies but the Lucas Clinic makes much of their money from their exclusive deal with celebrity Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon). To keep their exclusivity on the pathogens, they are patented and made to no longer be transmissible.

Unbeknownst to his bosses, Syd makes additional money by infecting himself with celebrity pathogens, incubating them in his own body, and then breaking the copyright to allow it to be sold on the black market. His contact in doing this is Arvid (Joe Pingue), who works in another branch of the celebrity worship field—he makes lab-grown meat from harvested celebrity cells, allowing people to essentially eat their idol.

When Hannah takes ill, Syd is sent to harvest her latest illness. Naturally, given what he does, he injects himself with it as well, hoping to figure it out and make money off what will be the newest celebrity illness. Unfortunately for him, the virus destroys the machine he uses to decode the viruses he decodes. Worse, a day or so after he takes the sample from her and injects himself, Hannah dies from the infection. Syd now has limited time to figure out how to cure himself, as well as figure out exactly what is happening to the people around Hannah and the virus/pathogen community and black market.

As you might expect given that basic description of the plot and themes of the film, Antiviral is deeply upsetting. It also feels like a series of themes that Brandon Cronenberg learned from his father, and that his father then built on for Crimes of the Future in significant ways. It also feels like Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t gone here first.

This is very clearly a body horror film and given the name, that shouldn’t at all be a surprise. It is not merely a film that uses aspects of body horror to make the audience uncomfortable, though. Instead, it is a film that uses extreme close-ups to not merely show us the horror but bring that horror directly into our laps. Everything feels like it was filmed three feet closer to the subject than it needs to be and this is clearly intentional. We are forced into almost physical contact with what we see on the screen, and since so much of what we see is immediately repellent, we naturally pull back from it.

Antiviral is a train wreck in the sense that it’s horrifying and makes us want to pull away but we find ourselves unable to do so. It’s Cronenberg’s first feature-length film, and it feels like it’s much more mature than this. He has clearly learned a lot from his father and uses many of the same basic themes and ideas, but he has also made it something personal for him. He’s not duplicating David Cronenberg, but creating something that is complementary and parallel to his father’s work.

Antiviral is deeply disturbing and upsetting, but in the best of ways. Beyond the discomfort of what we are shown on the screen is the discomfort of realizing that there are millions of people who, if they could have Taylor Swift’s head cold or Pedro Pascal’s viral infection, they’d do so in a heartbeat.

Why to watch Antiviral: It feels like it’s approaching reality.
Why not to watch: It is very uncomfortable in how it is filmed.