Have mercy on any famous filmmaker's son who hopes to follow in his father's footsteps. The comparisons will be inevitable.
How can fils possibly live up to pere? Maybe it's not such a problem if dad is, say, churn-'em-out schlockmeister Uwe Boll. But do you really want to smear the name of Pops Cronenberg by turning out a pile of junk?
With his debut picture, Antiviral, Brandon Cronenberg, son of David, has made a movie that's decidedly, resolutely unjunky — and more's the pity. This is a sleek, willfully elegant exercise, high on style even if it's conspicuously low on ideas.
The picture takes place in a future world where people pay good money to allow themselves to be injected with the same little bugs and viruses contracted by celebrities; it's just one way for them to get closer to the shallow, pretty public figures they idolize. The point, clearly, is that this is where we're headed if we don't kick our celebrity-worship habit, and it's one Cronenberg makes again and again, as if once weren't enough.
Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works in a clinic that administers these injections to eager customers. Little do his bosses know, though, that he's monkeying around with the company's virus recipes on the side; this is big business, and these special formulas are all copyright-protected.
He's also obsessed with superstar-for-no-reason Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), the stunning blond vixen who's the "face" of the company — the way, say, Jennifer Lawrence is the face of Dior — and he freely injects himself with the various little buggers that have coursed through her body.
Something goes wrong, of course, and Syd finds himself in danger, sickened to the point where blood flows freely from his mouth and weird protuberances grow from his back. He also finds himself on the wrong side of a bad-news butcher — played by Joe Pingue — who sells celebrity meat by day and trades in illegal pathogens by night.