Long live the new flesh! The new flesh here being David
Cronenberg’s son Brandon, who seems to have inherited his father’s body-horror
fixation and has used it to direct his feature-length debut Antiviral,
an unnerving yet very entertaining piece of science fiction.
Antiviral
offers a disturbing new meaning to our culture of celebrity obsession.
Televisions everywhere show round-the-clock footage of their lives and
newspapers are full of the tiniest stories and scandals. But that’s just the
beginning. Syd Marsh (Caleb Landry Jones) works for a company that specialises
in injecting members of the public with diseases that have been taken from
specific celebrities; you could be walking around with Madonna’s chest cold if
you wanted to. Part of Syd’s job is to ‘copyright’ these infections: to remove
all possibilities of contagion so that once they’re injected they cannot be
passed on. His desire to make a bit of extra money on the side however, coupled
with his own addictions, leads him to be injected with a disease so incurable,
it becomes a matter of life and death.
More a criticism of
celebrity culture than an accurate vision of the future, there are moments in this film that are frankly alarming, even when
compared to our present day society of Big Brother, X-Factor and Heat magazine,
a world in which attaining celebrity status is the only worthwhile ambition. In
Antiviral, for instance, there are companies that have developed ‘cell
stakes’, slabs of grey meat grown from the muscle cells of the rich and famous
that people actually queue up to buy and subsequently eat for lunch, their
excuse being that it makes them feel closer to those they admire. It’s moments
like these that make it a hard concept to imagine, yet it’s a credit to
Cronenberg’s direction, his cold, very clinical approach to every scene, that
makes it somehow believable.
What makes Antiviral
worth watching though, is Caleb Landry Jones, whose on-screen presence is
beyond sinister. You might recognise him from X Men: First Class, The
Last Exorcism and a couple of Breaking Bad episodes, but Antiviral
is very much his breakthrough role; he won’t be forgotten in a hurry. Very
pale, very freckled and with a ponytail of ginger hair, he has this
contemptuous expression on his face as if trying to keep from shouting at every
client who comes into his office, yet each line of dialogue is considered and
slow, sometimes menacing and other times devoid of any emotion at all, and he
has such a mesmerising way of walking through doors that it becomes hard to
take your eyes off him. Yet Jones’ talent really comes into effect as the virus
starts to take control of his body, developing a contorted, demonic stagger as
he attempts to go about his life as though nothing is wrong.
Now it wouldn’t be
right to compare the films of father and son. There are certainly elements that
share similarities: the hospital settings of Dead Ringers, the
exploration of media and addiction in Videodrome, but Antiviral
needs to be viewed as a completely separate piece of cinema, one that is
refreshingly unique in its approach to a topic dealt with many times before,
portraying a not-so-distant future with a strange, yet very absorbing
bleakness. It’s a well-directed film with an extraordinary performance at its
centre that serves as a perfect showcase for the brilliance of both Brandon
Cronenberg and Caleb Landry Jones; let’s hope their collaborations continue.
(Original review: http://www.impactnottingham.com/2012/12/review-antiviral/)
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