One of Cronenberg’s Sickest Early Films Was Given A Lo-Fi Update By His Son
From David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Rabid emerged Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral.
Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral and his father’s films Shivers and Rabid were produced in completely different eras of Canadian genre film. David Cronenberg’s diptych of infection thrillers (released in 1975 and 1977) came out before he had made a name for himself with superlative and singular takes on the fusing of technology and biology, such as Videodrome and The Fly. Even though they share clear DNA — plots about infection and mutation treated with a hungry eroticism — Cronenberg Sr.’s unpolished craft and inexperienced cast give Shivers and Rabid a handheld shabbiness that’s as charming as it is distracting.
Thirty-five years later, his son Brandon debuted as a filmmaker with a lo-fi dystopian conspiracy far more mannered, neatly composed, and talky than David’s takes on horror infecting contemporary society.
In a world where celebrity obsession has created an industry of stans buying the tissue and cells of their fave personalities, Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for a clinic that sells viruses extracted from sick celebs to hungry fans. While Antiviral, shot in the Cronenbergian capital of Toronto, benefited from Canadian and Ontario tax credits, its public funding pales in comparison to Shivers and Rabid, which were produced during Canada’s controversial Tax Shelter Era — while Cronenberg credits the massive investor incentives for helping him to launch his career, his first films gained a domestic notoriety for wasting taxpayer money on sick filth. Antiviral, by contrast, was blessed with a world premiere at Cannes, but its lack of shocked, offended press reception may have contributed to an extremely limited release, box office underperformance, and a subsequent eight-year break before his next film.
Now available in 4K, the crisp digital palette of Antiviral looks much different to the commercially-minded schlock-adjacent Shivers and Rabid, but the three films share a sick curiosity for the ways that modernity has become diseased. The colors are saturated to near-monochrome levels, the sandy greys only occasionally broken by the blackish-red tint of rash and blood on pale flesh. Brandon paints the zealousness of celebrity idolatry with a repressed, twitchy remove — a chronic longing rather than outward expressions of passion. Within the opening minutes, we sense that Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) is a celebrity par excellence, and doses of common conditions like herpes simplex virus are valued to a fetishistic degree.
Syd inspects a new pathogen.
Syd isn’t quite the model employee — using his own body as an incubator, he smuggles pathogens from work and sells them on the black market, using a clunky, mechanical console hidden behind a closet in his bare, unaesthetic apartment. When he subs in for a colleague to sample Hannah’s newest ailment, he injects some into himself as normal — only to painfully discover it’s a new, aggressive, violent virus tailor-made for Hannah.
David Cronenberg’s two virus films embrace a higher degree of chaos: Shivers is set at a luxury apartment complex (a similar setting to J.G. Ballard’s High Rise, published the same year) where the fantasy of modern urban development crumbles as the residents succumb to a sexual frenzy virus and are hunger to violate the uninfected. Just like in Rabid (wherein a female accident victim grows a phallic organ from an underarm orifice that feeds on human blood, eventually causing Canada to declare martial law), disease spreads not just through bodies, but across social and gendered plains. The aggression of a virus sometimes bolsters sexual attackers, but also is used by victims of sexual assault as a defensive weapon. In both films, Cronenberg draws provocative parallels between infection and infatuation —the proximity needed for transmission and delirium that follows contagion fills the films with a reluctance to get too close, despite the temptations of infected lovers.
Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) recovers from her latest illness.
By the time Brandon made Antiviral (both father and son were in their early 30s at the time of their viral movies), it was time to update the commentary on a sickly world. Viruses no longer violate the veneer of modernity, spreading unpredictable chaos through its luxury high-rises, subway cars, and shopping malls — they have become their own currency, and what is regarded as legal and humane is perverted in order to protect its value. Antiviral is a cynical reboot of the early Cronenbergian critiques, as if Brandon had genetically inherited his father’s way of seeing the biological in contest with the political.
The closing moments of Rabid hint ahead to Antiviral’s melancholy vision of order consuming disease’s aberrations — soldiers clad in protective clothing pick up the corpse of the woman who started the outbreak, throwing her in the back of a garbage truck like she was a bag of trash. No matter how mutated reality becomes, society will try to make it mundane and controllable, even if this leaves us with a bizarre and unrecognizable world. This is the thesis of Antiviral, and the unpleasant aftertaste it leaves you with.
