Antiviral @ 10: The Beginning of Brandon Cronenberg
Thursday, April 13, 2023 at 8:07PM 
It's been a decade since Brandon Cronenberg came into the scene, with Antiviral as his feature debut. That film was preceded by a couple of shorts, succeeded by various music videos, Possessor, and this year's Infinity Pool. Common themes reverberate through his oeuvre, linking him to his father's cinema. Like David, Brandon Cronenberg works within dimensions of horror, often considering transcendence through the body and the body transcended, altered, made a dream cum nightmare. Yet, despite similar interests, shared names, linked blood, father and son feel like unique auteurs, their connections superficial. One would expect the nepo baby to forever live in his patriarch's shadow, but maybe not…
In the younger Cronenberg's cinema, the imagined worlds projected on screen are only a step away from our reality. Technology marks the threshold between today and an imagined tomorrow, be it the conscience-transporting machines of Possessor or Infinity Pool's cloning practices. Compared to those two, Antiviral feels almost quaint. Here, everything is much the same as our realm, a celebrity culture pulsing its way into hell. Only the latest fad goes a bit further down the lane of invasiveness, with famous people selling their sicknesses, pathogens patented and distributed to the raving fandom for a high price.
The Lucas Clinic is just one amid many in a cottage industry of commodified unhealth. Go to a butcher shop, and you'll see another permutation of bodily materials reproduced and repurposed for sale, with genetic codes serving to make famous people steaks. But back to Lucas. Walk down its gleaming white corridors, and you'll encounter men in suits, all looking like imperfect copies of each other. Caleb Landry Jones' Syd is one such worker, a salesman who lures clients with a rehearsed spiel delivered in hushed tones. It's a pitch for parasocial obsession taken to grotesque extremes.
All that is perfectly fine, legal, dandy, and even normal. However, Syd has a dirty little secret. When not discussing a famous actress' vulva-less crotch or spying on clients who delight in tales of spice-filled foreskins, he's a thief. Using his body as vessel, the criminal smuggles diseases, incubating them before breaking their seal to make the goods passable from organism to organism. Then, he revives the virus, pirating them as part of a black market parallel to Lucas and its ilk. One day, the scheme goes wrong. It starts as a slightly disrupted routine when Syd takes the place of a fired colleague to harvest Hannah Geist's latest malady.
She's the 'it girl' of the moment, so he takes her blood to infect himself before the virus is processed and copyrighted. But there's something, something far more vicious than herpes ravaging him from the inside out. Soon, her death's announced on the news and he may be dying, the lethal agent within a hot property for the black market since deadly pathogens are illegal to commercialize. From there, Syd's life descends into the pits of corporate espionage, piracy, and conspiracy to render an iconic body into an active cell farm. Celebrity is powerful in as much as it is a product, a general hallucination. The celebrated person is as superfluous as the clients clamoring for more.
Satire is obvious, near facile, but it's hard to deny the stomach-churning effect it induces. But then, that might have more to do with the execution than Antiviral's premise. It's precisely constructed, awakening feelings of violation with audiovisual strategies, sometimes something as simple as the contrast between dark splotches against white.
The sterility of the Lucas headquarters extends to a cosmos of modernist interiors, spartan imagery overexposed to make it corpse pale. Every face the camera regards appears dead, only flushing with a breath of life when pinked by fever. It's an ungodly miracle of glossy cinematography, whipped clean of any texture and in beautiful alliance with production design that's both mundane and unnerving. Casting also helps, of course. Jones' fair skin is the film's palette made flesh, dotted freckles insinuating the rust red that bloodies clinical surfaces. When it's clammy, even better. Sweat forming a film over the visage, he's ideal for a context where illness is a product, a status signifier, unwell glamour.
Body broken by an ever-spinning kaleidoscope of disease, the character of Syd is also the perfect protagonist for a kind of body horror that strives for alienation more than queasy identification. Moreover, this distancing promoted by personage, actor, and director suggests a level of pitch-black comedy that would metastasize as Infinity Pool's cancerous humor. However, that doesn't invalidate an underlying profundity, pairing well with Possessor's ideas of being someone else, invasion or consumption as a way of finding connection. Throughout all this, Cronenberg Jr. doesn't genre-hop so much as he makes Antiviral glide through different registers, fluid in the way a funeral procession might be if the mourners were floating, ghost-like, above the ground.
Ten years later, Antiviral reveals itself an assured debut that also serves as the first stanza in an ongoing poem, each new film deepening our view into the sordid imaginings of Brandon Cronenberg. I don't know about you, but even if there's failure in the future, I can't wait to see what he does next.
Three features in, what's your favorite Brandon Cronenberg flick? Do you love this anti-septic debut, Possessor, or Infinity Pool?
Reader Comments (2)
I miss the old times when people like Jamie Lee Curtis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Melanie Griffith and Brandon Cronenberg were merely descendants from another famous in the same industry, not “nepo babies”.
Excellent write up.
I remember appreciating Antiviral when it came out. It's filled with the kind of risky choices I love to see in horror. It's messy and that's kind of the point. You don't really get the time to process what's actually going on before it spirals even further into a celebrity-worship dystopia.
I think Possessor is my favorite right now. I want to watch Infinity Pool again now that I know what to expect. That's pretty common for me with body horror. I like to go back to pick up the pieces after the initial shock wears off.