Antiviral

Description

Brandon Cronenberg | Canada 2012 | 108min. | Print Source: IFC

Brandon Cronenberg's striking body-horror debut is a prescient and chilling vision of our cultural obsession with celebrity. In a dystopian future world, Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works at the Lucas Clinic, which has an unusual and highly profitable line of business: deliberately infecting paying customers with diseases harvested from top celebrities, thus providing a "biological communion" between stars and fans. Though his work environment is tightly monitored, Syd manages to sneak viruses out of the office for his lucrative sideline supplying the black-market disease trade. Gruesomely absurd and incisive, Antiviral is a visceral satire on our contemporary society of the spectacle. (Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo, TIFF)