Antiviral (film)
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| Directed by | Brandon Cronenberg |
| Produced by | Niv Fichman |
| Written by | Brandon Cronenberg |
| Starring | Caleb Landry Jones |
| Music by | E.C. Woodley |
| Cinematography | Karim Hussain |
| Edited by | Matthew Hannam |
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108 minutes |
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| Language | English |
| Budget | C$3.3 million |
| Box office | $61,808 |
Antiviral is a 2012 Canadian-French science fiction horror film directed by Brandon Cronenberg. The film competed in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Cronenberg re-edited the film after the festival to make it tighter, trimming nearly six minutes out of the film.
The revised film was first shown at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, and was a co-winner, alongside Jason Buxton's Blackbird, of the festival's Best Canadian First Feature Film award.
In a dystopian near-future, Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) is employed by the Lucas Clinic, a company which purchases viruses and other pathogens from celebrities who fall ill, in order to inject them into clients who desire a connection with celebrities. In particular, the pathogens supplied by the Lucas Clinic's exclusive celebrity Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) are extremely popular, and another employee at the clinic, Derek Lessing (Reid Morgan), is responsible for harvesting them from Hannah directly. To make extra money, Syd uses his own body as an incubator, steals pathogens from the lab, and sells them on the black market. To do so, he uses a stolen console to break the copy protection placed on the virus by the clinic; once injected in a client, the pathogen is rendered incommunicable. He then passes the pathogens to Arvid (Joe Pingue), who works at Astral Bodies, a celebrity meatmarket where meat is grown from the cells of celebrities for consumption.
After Derek is caught smuggling and arrested, Lucas asks Syd to take his place and harvest a pathogen from Hannah, who has recently fallen ill. Once he has taken a blood sample from Hannah, Syd quickly injects himself with some of her blood. He experiences the first symptoms, fever and disorientation, rapidly, and he leaves work early. His attempts to remove the virus' copy protection are unsuccessful, and the console is destroyed during the process. When Syd awakens from severe delirium the next day, he discovers Hannah has died from the unknown disease, and all products harvested from her have skyrocketed in popularity. Desperate to fix his console, he approaches Arvid, who sets up a meeting with Levine, the leader of the piracy group. Levine offers to fix the console in exchange for samples of Syd's blood, but Syd refuses. Levine subdues him and forcibly takes samples from Syd, as the pathogen which killed Hannah is now hotly in demand on the black market, and lethal pathogens are not legal to distribute.
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