Trailer
Plot summary
Lucas Clinic buys viruses and other pathogens from celebrities and infects paying fans who want a connection with their idols. Each product carries copy protection that makes the pathogen incommunicable once a client has been infected. Hannah Geist is the clinic's exclusive celebrity and her pathogens are the most popular; a colleague, Derek Lessing, harvests them from her. Syd March takes pathogens from the lab without permission, breaks the protection with a stolen console, uses his own body as an incubator and hands the samples to Arvid, who works at a celebrity meat market. When Derek is arrested for smuggling, Syd is assigned to replace him and harvest from Hannah, who has recently fallen ill. He draws a sample of her blood and injects it into himself.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Antiviral (2012)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Cronenberg said the film's central idea came to him in a fever dream during a bout of illness: delirious, he obsessed over the fact that something in his body had come from someone else's body, then tried to think of a character who would see disease that way and settled on a celebrity-obsessed fan.
- The idea was further shaped by an interview Sarah Michelle Gellar gave on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, in which she said she was sick and that if she sneezed she would infect the whole audience, and everyone just started cheering.
- Cronenberg re-edited the film after the festival to make it tighter, trimming nearly six minutes; the revised version was first shown at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won Best Canadian First Feature Film alongside Jason Buxton's Blackbird.
