First Trailer For Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral Asks Are You Bleeding Yet?
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Brandon Cronenberg certainly looks like a chip off the creepy block. Maybe the son of David is genetically predisposed to create unnerving cinema. A new trailer for Brandon’s directorial debut, Antiviral, might just make your skin crawl. The video promises cannibalism, celebrity, disease, obsession, and more, all explored in the most disturbing possible way.
Does this remind anyone else of those Resident Evil trailers that were framed as commercials for the Umbrella Corporation? The two share a number of visual similarities, chief among them the use of stark, white backgrounds to set off red of blood. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say Antiviral is going to be very different from any of the Resident Evil movies. (Bold prediction, I know.)
Antiviral envisions a near future world where the fixation on celebrity has gone so far that the most hardcore fans eat meat cloned from stars and actually pay money to be infected with the same illnesses that afflict their idols. Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones, X-Men: First Class) harvests diseases from the famous. He tries to steal a disease from an actress, by smuggling it in his own bloodstream. Unfortunately for Syd, the actress dies, and he’s more than a little bit screwed. In order to save his own ass, he must solve the riddle of her death.
Hopefully someday soon we’ll be able to talk about Brandon Cronenberg without invoking his famous father. Antiviral looks like a strong film, and from all reports, it stands on its own merits. Right now, however, that’s a difficult task because this film shows a strong thematic resemblance to the elder Cronenberg’s films— Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and even The Fly spring readily to mind.
Regardless of the director’s familial lineage, this Antiviral trailer is downright eerie. There’s no set date for a wide release, yet, but the word “soon” looms large in the trailer, with a sense of foreboding that seems like a warning more than anything else.
Check out www.lucasclinic.com for a viral (I tried to come up with another word, I’m sorry) glimpse into the world of Antiviral.
