Yesterday the Toronto Film Festival announced their Canadian film line-up, which included two standout films from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The first was Xavier Dolan‘s Laurence Anyways, a film I loved (read my review here) and the other was Brandon Cronenberg‘s intense feature debut, Antiviral, which I also saw and enjoyed, though perhaps not to the same level as most.
The film follows Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), an employee at the Lucas Clinic (see viral video to the right) that sells injections of live viruses harvested from sick celebrities to obsessed fans. Biological communion — for a price. Syd also supplies illegal samples of these viruses to piracy groups, smuggling them from the clinic in his own body. When he becomes infected with the disease that kills super sensation Hannah Geist, Syd becomes a target for collectors and rabid fans. He must unravel the mystery surrounding her death before he suffers the same fate.
Yes, Antiviral takes a sick look at our celebrity-obsessed lifestyles in a most extraordinary way and if you for a second think something like this could never happen, I would suggest you think about it again. Think about how many gossip websites are out there and think about how many people hate gossip websites and yet still manage to know virtually everything that’s going on in the world of celebrity. In this sense, we live in an absolutely sick society where we keep our friends at arms length. We’re detached from reality and connected virtually and therefore we would need to find that closeness in some way or another.
You can check out the trailer below. IFC Midnight picked the film up and will release it later this year and if you’d like, you can read my full review from Cannes right here.
