Antiviral

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, David Cronenberg should be feeling pretty chuffed with son Brandon’s big-screen debut, a petri dish of high-concept perversity and cultural commentary teeming with lo-fi ickiness.

For all its preoccupation with disease, Antiviral isn’t especially visceral. The movie can be repulsive at times, but Cronenberg is more interested in ideas than in blood and guts.

Papa Cronenberg must be proud, but be advised: If there's a blood test in your future, book it before seeing this movie.

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 debut film of Brandon Cronenberg deals out shivers and flinches in little hypodermic jabs.

At a certain point, Antiviral doesn’t know where to go or how to break out of its vacuum-sealed sepulcher, and Syd, even when vomiting blood, remains as incorporeal and creepy as a ghost. This is a movie that drinks its own tainted blood.

Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome.

La historia tiene un concepto muy original y novedoso, pero el planteamiento es monótono y de muy pocas pulgas, le falta algo que la haga ser más atractiva ya que se siente demasiado cínica a la vez que nihilista.

Antiviral is not easy to characterize or rate. After the first half hour, I thought I would be rating it up. It begins more sci-fi than horror with look into a concept world (a kind of dystopia that people living in consider normal). From there it becomes less about the ideas and more a typical corporate thriller. The plot falls off and does not hold attention. Still, it is an interesting film that can be recommended to both fans of sci-fi and art house, though be warned that it has a fair amount of non-violent / psychological horror.

2012 the year in which this film was released or 2019 the year I finally saw it. Its argument adjusts perfectly in any year since then. If what happens in this film happens to be possible in real life, I don't want to imagine how many people would actually do it. But it would be too many and that's not sad. It's grotesque. Antiviral has an interesting theme but its slow narrative and its amateur staging only manage to decompensate the small balance that exists in its interesting story and therefore its structural poverty ended up undermining my interest and enjoyment. It's a weekend film. And only if you don't have better options.

This could have been "fleshed out" into a reasonably entertaining Sci-Fi horror tale in the hands of someone who has developed the skill set to produce a coherent, suspenseful, and understandable storyline. Instead, this disjointed, painfully slow, essentially one character diatribe is presented in its place. and passed off as something deep and profound. Honestly, I've seen movies made by High School students that were better than this. It's mind boggling to imagine all the time and money wasted on this effort.

Viruses that cannot reproduce aren't viruses at all... They are used to actually immunize people to the disease without any chance of a real infection. At this story the "science" behind this SciFi doesn't make sense. The celebrity cult with cannibalism doesn't make much sense. And besides this we see a pretty mediocre story...