✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Canada, France · 2012
1h 50m
Director Brandon Cronenberg
Starring Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Malcolm McDowell, Joe Pingue
Genre Horror, Science Fiction
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This darkly satirical horror film imagines a future where celebrity worship has reached terrifying new heights. Syd works for a clinic that harvests celebrity pathogens, selling them to fans who wish to experience the same diseases as their idols. When superstar Hannah Geist dies, Syd must unravel the mystery of the infectious disease that killed her while battling it himself.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by
For his feature film debut, Brandon Cronenberg has taken the decidedly uneasy route in more ways than one. First of all, Antiviral is a virtual panoply of high wooziness, replete with sweating, shakes, vomiting, rot-infected food and more needles piercing skin than rush hour at a free flu clinic.
A one-joke movie--a good joke, yes, but Brandon Cronenberg's agenda clouds the clarity that's needed to fully deliver the punchline.
Papa Cronenberg must be proud, but be advised: If there's a blood test in your future, book it before seeing this movie.
The whole movie feels like a case of the sweats, putting you in desperate need of the chicken soup of recognizable human behavior.
Icky though it is, Antiviral never builds the sort of character investment or narrative momentum that would allow its visceral horrors to seriously disturb, rather than seeming like choice gross-out moments lovingly designed for maximum viewer recoil.
The Playlist by Kevin Jagernauth
It's exactly the oddball and crooked tale you'd want and expect from a Cronenberg with all the gratuitous blood, pus, bone and multiple closeups of needles piercing skin you could ask for. Dad would be proud.
A smart, subversive but rather cold debut from Brandon Cronenberg that's short of the dark wit that lit up his father's early work. Then again, comparisons are hardly fair, especially when Cronenberg Jr. clearly has plenty of ideas of his own.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome.
From the concept on down, Cronenberg’s film inevitably resembles the ‘80s body horror with which father David made his name, but Brandon brings his own antiseptic eye to this queasy noir mutation, like “D.O.A.” for a self-serving near-future.
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