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| A bloody mouth providing marketing for Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral |
In the near future, a company exists that offers celebrities' diseases for purchase to ordinary people. Our hero secretly smuggles viruses out from the clinic in his own body, but in doing so now contracts a mortal illness.
Antiviral plays out in clinically sterile sets and has a fascinatingly beautiful lead in Caleb Landry Jones (X-Men: First Class (2011)), who gets transformed into something hideous during the film. - Brandon Cronenberg (Broken Tulips (2008) short), whose feature film debut this is, seems, however, obsessed with Jones and continually explores him in tediously long shots without anything dramatic happening.
Antiviral's big problem is that it fairly quickly becomes an extremely laborious and unpleasant film. Cronenberg's dislike of giving expositional information makes us as audiences fumble around in darkness with his permanently sick, unsympathetic and disgusting characters. Unsurprisingly, Cronenberg thought this serving up while "in a fever dream during a bout of illness." And on top of this, it seems that he has a sickly fetish for bodily fluids. Should this for some reason tease you, Antiviral may be just what you've been looking for.
Cronenberg is the son of great Canadian director David Cronenberg (Maps to the Stars (2014)), and Antiviral seems almost overly virtuous to the family name in that it seems like it might have been made by his father, had he been a young man today. But, perhaps, before slashing Brandon Cronenberg for not rebelling against his heavy heritage here, we should remember that David Cronenberg also started his later illustrious film career with some pretty soggy flicks like Shivers (1975).
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| Lead Caleb Landry Jones in a typical moment of his from Brandon Cronenberg's Antiviral |
Watch the trailer here
Cost: 3.3 mil. Can. $
Box office: 0.06 mil. $
= Mega-flop
[Despite competing in Cannes' Un Certain Regard-section and being shown in Toronto International Film Festival, and winning Best Canadian First Feature Film award at the Canadian Film Awards, (co-winning (...) with Jason Buxton's Blackbird), Antiviral has gotten lukewarm reviews and has bombed severely financially. Brandon Cronenberg clearly has his work cut out for him in finding finance for his next film.]
What do you think of Antiviral?
Do you want to see another film by Brandon Cronenberg?
If so, what do you think he should tackle next?
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