science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...
horror film
Horror is a film genre that seeks to elicit fear or disgust in its audience for entertainment purposes.
Horror films often explore dark subject matter and may deal with transgressive topics or themes. Broad elements include monsters, ap ...
Un Certain Regard
(, meaning 'a certain glance') is a section of the Cannes Film Festival's official selection. It is run at the Debussy, parallel to the competition for the . This section was introduced in 1978 by Gilles Jacob.
The section presents 20 films w ...
'' section at the
2012 Cannes Film Festival
The 65th Cannes Film Festival was held from 16 to 27 May 2012. Italian film director Nanni Moretti was the President of the Jury for the main competition and British actor Tim Roth was the President of the Jury for the Un Certain Regard sectio ...
. Cronenberg re-edited the film after the festival to make it tighter, trimming nearly six minutes out of the film. The revised film was first shown at the
2012 Toronto International Film Festival
The 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada between September 6 and September 16, 2012. TIFF announced the films that were accepted on August 21, 2012. On its 37th edition the TIFF included a 2 ...
, and was a co-winner, alongside
Jason Buxton
Jason Buxton is a Canadian film director and screenwriter. He wrote and directed three short films, ''A Fresh Start'', ''The Garden'' and ''The Drawing'', before debuting his first full-length feature film, '' Blackbird'', in 2012.Blackbird'', of the festival's Best Canadian First Feature Film award.
Plot
Syd March is employed by the Lucas Clinic, a company which purchases viruses and other pathogens from celebrities who fall ill, in order to inject them into clients who desire a connection with celebrities. In particular, the pathogens supplied by the Lucas Clinic's exclusive celebrity Hannah Geist are extremely popular, and another employee at the clinic, Derek Lessing, is responsible for harvesting them from Hannah directly. To make extra money, Syd uses his own body as an incubator, steals pathogens from the lab, and sells them on the
black market
A black market, underground economy, or shadow economy is a clandestine market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality or is characterized by noncompliance with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the ...
. To do so, he uses a stolen console to break the copy protection placed on the virus by the clinic; once injected in a client, the pathogen is rendered incommunicable. He then passes the pathogens to Arvid, who works at Astral Bodies, a celebrity
meat market
A meat market is, traditionally, a marketplace where meat is sold, often by a butcher. It is a specialized wet market. The term is sometimes used to refer to a meat retail store or butcher's shop, in particular in North America. During the mid ...
where meat is grown from the cells of celebrities for consumption.
After Derek is caught smuggling and arrested, Lucas asks Syd to take his place and harvest a pathogen from Hannah, who has recently fallen ill. Once he has taken a blood sample from Hannah, Syd quickly injects himself with some of her blood. He experiences the first symptoms, fever and disorientation, rapidly, and he leaves work early. His attempts to remove the virus' copy protection are unsuccessful, and the console is destroyed during the process. When Syd awakens from severe delirium the next day, he discovers Hannah has died from the unknown disease, and all products harvested from her have skyrocketed in popularity. Desperate to fix his console, he approaches Arvid, who sets up a meeting with Levine, the leader of the piracy group. Levine offers to fix the console in exchange for samples of Syd's blood, but Syd refuses. Levine subdues him and forcibly takes samples from Syd, as the pathogen which killed Hannah is now hotly in demand on the black market, and lethal pathogens are not legal to distribute.
The next day, a severely ill Syd is approached by two men, who drive him to an undisclosed location where Hannah is actually still alive. Syd learns from Hannah's physician Dr. Abendroth that the virus infecting them both has been intentionally engineered with a security measure to prevent analysis, which explains why Syd's console was destroyed. Hannah's death was fabricated to protect her, but she is shown to be in the extreme stages of the illness, extremely weak and bleeding from her mouth. Dr. Abendroth reveals to Syd that the virus is a modified version of an illness that Hannah has had before, and that he himself has an infatuation with her, having had samples of her skin grafted to his own arm. He further suggests that since Syd unnecessarily injected himself with Hannah's blood, he too is "just another fan." As Syd's condition worsens, he returns to the Lucas Clinic, where he traces the original strain of the virus to Derek, who sold it to a rival company, Vole & Tesser. Dr. Abendroth discovers that Vole & Tesser patented the modified strain, though their motives remain unclear.
Before Syd can proceed further, he is abducted by Levine and incarcerated in a room where his deterioration and death will be broadcast on
reality television
Reality television is a genre of television programming that documents purportedly unscripted real-life situations, often starring unfamiliar people rather than professional actors. Reality television emerged as a distinct genre in the early 1 ...
to sate Hannah's fans, who could not witness her death. As Syd begins to show the final symptoms, he escapes by spearing Levine in the mouth with a syringe and holding a nurse hostage with his infected blood. After Syd realizes that Vole & Tesser infected Hannah to harvest their own patented pathogen from her, Syd contacts Tesser and negotiates a deal. The film closes with a
virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), edu ...
version of Hannah that advertises her "Afterlife" exclusively from Vole & Tesser. Syd is shown working for Vole & Tesser, where Hannah's cells have been replicated to form a distorted cell garden from Astral Bodies' celebrity meat technology. Viruses injected into her system are sold. Syd demonstrates a new virus as he sticks a needle into a genetically created arm. Later, while alone, Syd cuts the arm and drinks the flowing blood; it is revealed the arm is in fact Hannah's, as her deformed face and body are shown to be in the Cell Garden chamber.
Cast
Production
Cronenberg has stated that the genesis of the film was a viral infection he once had. More precisely, the "central idea came to him in a fever dream during a bout of illness," wrote journalist Jill Lawless. Cronenberg said, "I was delirious and was obsessing over the physicality of illness, the fact that there was something in my body and in my cells that had come from someone else's body, and I started to think there was a weird intimacy to that connection. And afterwards I tried to think of a character who would see a disease that way and I thought: a celebrity-obsessed fan. Celebrity culture is completely bodily obsessed - who has the most cellulite, who has fungus feet? Celebrity culture completely fetishizes the body and so I thought the film should also fetishize the body - in a very grotesque way."
It was further shaped when he saw an interview
Sarah Michelle Gellar
Sarah Michelle Prinze ( ; born April 14, 1977) is an American actress. After being spotted at the age of four in New York City, she made her screen acting debut in the television film ''An Invasion of Privacy'' (1983). A leading role on the te ...
did on ''
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
''Jimmy Kimmel Live!'' is an American late-night talk show, created and hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, broadcast on ABC. The nightly hour-long show debuted on January 26, 2003, at Hollywood Masonic Temple in Hollywood, California, as part of ABC's ...
''; what struck him was when "she said she was sick and if she sneezed she'd infect the whole audience, and everyone just started cheering."
Principal photography
Principal photography is the phase of producing a film or television show in which the bulk of shooting takes place, as distinct from the phases of pre-production and post-production.
Personnel
Besides the main film personnel, such as ...
took place in
Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is a port city in the Canadian province of Ontario. Hamilton has a population of 569,353, and its census metropolitan area, which includes Burlington and Grimsby, has a population of 785,184. The city is approximately southwest of ...
and in
Toronto
Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the anch ...
.
Reception
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wan ...
reports that 66% of critics gave the film a positive review with an average score of 5.9/10, based on 93 reviews. The site's consensus reads, "''Antiviral'' is a well crafted body horror, packed with interesting - if not entirely subtle - ideas." It holds a score of 55 out of 100 on review aggregator
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...
, based on 18 reviews.
Writing for ''
The Daily Telegraph
''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally.
It was f ...
'', Tim Robey gives the film 4 stars, calling it "an eye-widening delve into conceptual science fiction," with the "gruesome verve" of his father
David Cronenberg
David Paul Cronenberg (born March 15, 1943) is a Canadian film director, screenwriter, and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror genre, with his films exploring visceral bodily transformation ...
's early work, "and morbidity to match", and says "there's real muscle in its ideas, a potent kind of satirical despair, and a level of craft you rarely expect from a first-timer."
Writing for ''
Empire
An empire is a "political unit" made up of several territories and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire (sometimes referred to as the metropole) ex ...
'',
Kim Newman
Kim James Newman (born 31 July 1959) is an English journalist, film critic and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's ''Dracula'' at ...
called it "a smart, subversive but rather cold debut". '' Variety's'' Justin Chang stated that Brandon Cronenberg "has his own distinct flair for the grotesque", but that "the film suffers from basic pacing issues" and that "''Antiviral'' never builds the sort of character investment or narrative momentum that would allow its visceral horrors to seriously disturb." Stephen Garrett of ''
The New York Observer
''The New York Observer'' was a weekly newspaper printed from 1987 to 2016, when it ceased print publication and became the online-only newspaper ''Observer''. The media site focuses on culture, real estate, media, politics and the entertainmen ...
'' described the film as "stomach-churning" and added that "the production, though impeccably polished and featuring an abundance of blood, spit, mucus, and pus, misses the mark with underdeveloped characters and a schematic plot. But boy, do those gory ideas and notions linger in the mind."
Peter Bradshaw of ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers '' The Observer'' and '' The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the ...
'' was more negative, stating that "Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome."