Antiviral, a kind-of-Sci-Fi 2012 thriller from Brandon Cronenberg, does a pretty good job of it, and makes it both as cerebral and uncomfortable as you'd expect from a Cronenberg scion. It's set... not exactly five minutes into the future, but a couple of steps to the side of our reality, in a society where celebrity worship is a mite more extreme.
There's a (pretty funny) running gag about increasingly intrusive celebrity scoops, clandestine (?) restaurants that serve beef grown from celebrity flesh, and, more central to the film's plot, a few biotech enterprises that allow fans to get a little closer to their objects of adoration in some pretty twisted ways.
Syd (Caleb Landry Jones, spending most of the movie looking like he's just about to keel over) works for one of the bigger and more legitimate of these enterprises, a clinic that specializes in harvesting illnesses from a small stable of celebrities, locking the viruses down so they won't be contagious, and infecting clients with them for a price. Syd's introduced selling Herpes from their biggest celebrity, Hannah Geist (Sara Gadon), to a young man - he injects the kid with the virus on the left side of his mouth, because, as he explains. that's where she would have transmitted the chancre if she had kissed him in person.
Syd looks pretty unhealthy, and that's because he's moonlighting by smuggling illnesses out of the clinic in his own body. He incubates them and sells them to the black market (he has a stolen virus-encoding machine at home to unlock them). This is why, when he's tapped to pick up a new Illness from Ms. Geist, he injects himself with a sample first, hoping for a big payday.
Unfortunately for him, Ms. Geist's mysterious illness turns out to be fatal. And to add insult to injury, his being infected turns him into a target for various groups to vie after. It's an effective thriller set up, and it's played surprisingly straight as a compelling, satisfying corporate espionage story, with cool (if not always completely credible) twists and turns.
Unfortunately for him, Ms. Geist's mysterious illness turns out to be fatal. And to add insult to injury, his being infected turns him into a target for various groups to vie after. It's an effective thriller set up, and it's played surprisingly straight as a compelling, satisfying corporate espionage story, with cool (if not always completely credible) twists and turns.
A very low budget gets in the way a little - some of the sets don't entirely convince, the pacing is a bit uneven, and some of the actors are slightly off- but Cronenberg has his father's knack for clean, clinical shots and upsetting imagery; the sound design is on-point as well.
If needles scare you, brace yourself; There are lots and lots of lovingly shot injections here, often in close-up. Also, the sort of biological aberrations you'd expect, low-key body horror, people choking on blood... you know, continuing the Cronenberg family business.
The sci-fi is pretty soft, but some of the weirder conceits are based on real science. The biotech, sure, but also the technology used to encrypt the viruses, based on facial recognition, which is incredibly dense with information for human observers. It's there as more of a cool, unique visual touch, and doesn't entirely make sense as used, but it is real.
Meanwhile almost everything is held at an arm's length, distant. Syd's a scuzzy sociopath working for a loathsome industry who gets a little sympathy when he's involved in the machinations of bigger fish, then pisses it off in a huge (and grimly hilarious) way. We never know what the celebrities are famous for - it's not important - but the one we do see is the most sympathetic character in the movie, and she's also purely a victim. Little more than a ghost, true to her name. Nothing here is particularly subtle, but... well, what would you expect when dealing with celebrity culture?
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