By Keri O’Shea
Ever wondered where our modern day obsession with celebrity comes from? Or indeed, where it’s going? We live in times where the slightest physical imperfection in even a minor television star is reported and scrutinised ad infinitum, often at the expense of what most sane people would judge to be genuine news. There’s an entire industry of people dedicated to following, photographing and harassing celebrities; nothing is sacred, and here in the UK we’ve just come out of a scandal where it transpired that the voicemails of many well-known public figures were routinely hacked, simply to feed the voracious public appetite for non-stories. In light of this, the dystopia brought to us by Brandon Cronenberg in Antiviral is, like all of the best dystopias, eerily plausible.
Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for the Lucas Corporation, a company which specialises in providing ‘biological communion’ between celebrity and fan: this is achieved by harvesting viruses from celebrities which can be purchased, for a price, and transmitted. Such is the level of obsession in the Ontario of Cronenberg’s imagination; we see celebrities are everywhere, on streaming twenty-four hour news channels, on every billboard, magazine and newspaper. Syd’s landlady is perpetually in front of her TV screen, eager to relate every petty detail about the famous to her tenant, when she sees him, and one of the most successful celebrities is a woman called Hannah Geist, who is herself a client of the Lucas Corporation. But Syd is undertaking a peculiar form of insider trading by deliberately infecting himself with the diseases of the famous in order to pass them on to the black market. When he visits Hannah to retrieve a new infection from her, he as usual injects himself with her blood. But when Hannah’s condition worsens, he has to investigate this strange infection quickly if he is to save his own life. It turns out that he’s on the brink of a disturbing discovery…
David Cronenberg’s name has become synonymous with ‘body horror’, movies which question and threaten bodily health and integrity, and it seems that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. In this, his first feature-length film, Cronenberg Jr. is continuing with many of the themes which also interested his father, though if Brandon Cronenberg’s style seems even colder, less wry than dear old dad, as well as being honed to say something about the times in which we are living now. The world of the movie is our world, after all, with one or two minor additions. When people go through celebrities’ garbage in the effort to feel closer to a stranger, is the possibility of this world so far from likely? Everything outside of the business carried out by the Lucas Corporation is recognisable, except with one dramatic extension. If the world in the film was more different then the impact of its central premise would be lost, and the anxiety which it conveys so successfully would be less apparent.
At the heart of the movie is the brilliantly enigmatic performance offered up by Caleb Landry Jones. We gather almost no information about him or his state of mind, beyond his actions for the corporation and his illicit actions on the side: he doesn’t discuss his motivations, and throughout he is quiet and reticent. Why does he persist in communicating these viruses to his shadier associates? Money doesn’t seem to be much of a motivator, at least not that we see: he lives sparsely and simply, eating pre-packed food and keeping himself to himself. He doesn’t seem to enjoy any of the company he keeps, has no family that we see, and no friends beyond work colleagues. Perhaps Syd Marsh seeks the same sort of biological communion that he sells because he is just as lonely as his customers. He’s more of an unknown quantity though, and sustains a complexity throughout which acts as a successful lynch-pin for the plot. Also, his disassociative nature reflects the world around him: celebrities like Heidi are famous for being famous, but they’re not treated like human beings. They’re objects, reduced to two dimensions, and in many ways Syd is the same – he has surrendered his internal life for reasons we aren’t given. He lives as vicariously as his clients, in many ways, but keeps us at arm’s length as to why.
So much for the human interest angle, then, as significant as it is; this is a movie about the deliberate harvesting and sale of viruses (and a not-so-subtle dig at what it means to be a mindless consumer), and as such, it is far from lacking in toe-curling medical procedures throughout, some of which are far from easy on the eye. If you are not a fan of unflinching depictions of same, then I’d strongly suggest you give this one a miss. Syringes, bloodletting and symptoms of illness figure very prominently, and by the time we come to some of the final reels this is magnified to truly grotesque proportions. It never lets up on the gloom though, and the on-screen horrors are never reduced to special effects for their own sake; whatever we see has at its heart the same pessimistic message and adds more to the ever-weighty atmosphere.
Antiviral, like all good body horrors, takes an element of the fantastic, but here it is refracted through a ‘What if?’ we can really believe in. Its methods are disturbing and its details are unnerving, but ultimately, this is one of the most compelling stories about profound modern loneliness which I have seen to date. This is a razor-sharp, chilling film, and one which will stay with you.