Antiviral (2012)

Premise: Okay, yeah, so the premise here is kind of bonkers: it is the not so distant but definitely dystopic near future. Celebrity worship has reached new highs/lows (honestly it depends on your point of view) and the new “thing” people are doing is buying “celebrity illnesses”. What is that, you ask? Oh, easy: you go to this company, check a catalogue of celebrities, choose your favourite and then you can go home with an injection that will give you a cold, or the flu, or herpes or whatever. But get this: that cold, flu or etc comes directly from your celebrity! So you’ll be sharing that and uh I’m sure if they knew you also had their specific diahrrea there could be… some… smooching involved?!
So our main guy works for one of these companies but at the same time has some sort of side gig where he uh injects certain new celebrity bugs or whatever so he can sell them on the black market and, honestly, it’s all a big metaphor for something. We don’t care about that kind of thing here at Impeccable Taste, for us the point is it’s very disgusting and the dude looks like shit.
Would it surprise you if I told you this is yet another Cronenberg Jr joint (you might remember him from Infinity Pool and Possessor, or from being his dad’s heir to the kingdom)? No? Well yeah I suppose.
Under 90 minutes? Almost 20 minutes over that, tsk tsk.
Do they say the title? Oh yeah and it is glorious.

One sentence review:

Okay, more: Look, here at Impeccable Taste HQ we’ve never tried to hide in any way that we love our Favourites, Muses and that little lovable gremlin called Willem Dafoe. Now, there’s a bit of a stretch between the honest appreciation and feeling like I’d like to get the same rash Laurence Fishburne had during the filming of The Second of the John Wicks after playing too much with all those pigeons. In this movie it is completely normal to go to a restaurant (or your crappy butcher down the street) and order a nice Celebrity Steak where the meat has been grown in a vat but it’s, hey, that random dude you like. So uh yeah where I’m getting is that things get very, very bleak here and it’s one of those movies where you can’t help rubbernecking and trying to guess just what’s going to be the next thing and how horrible is it going to be compared to the previous crime against humanity. I’m saying all this as a good thing, go give this one a watch if you want to ruin your appetite!
A simple way to improve it: I don’t know if you are aware but a few years ago there was a pandemic and sometimes stuff like that puts movies in a different light, gives them a new perspective or makes you wonder “huh, what would they change here after COVID?”.
In this case I suppose it’d be cool to add some weirdos having like demonstrations outside these clinics to convince you of how all this was a conspiracy by Them to make you believe celebrities exist.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

In the film, the character Syd March says “Gives me the shivers”. This a nod to the film Shivers, directed by David Cronenberg, Brandon Cronenberg’s father.