I don’t know why I haven’t watched any of the films of Brandon Cronenberg yet. When I was first really getting into horror as a genre, his dad, David Cronenberg, was my absolute favorite director, making work so rich in concept, with gripping ideas that challenge and stretch the idea of the body, the mind, the self, and not in arsty, self-important packages, but in wild, fleshy, sexual, bloody weird rides (I also don’t know why I haven’t written about any of David Cronenberg’s films yet – one of these days). And when the younger Cronenberg hit the scene with his 2012 premiere, Antiviral, the buzz was that he was similarly invested in big concepts, but that he was also absolutely his own artist, with his own clear voice. By all counts, I should have leapt at the chance to check him out. But somehow, I never did.
Then in 2020, after some hiatus, he returned with Possessor, and I heard from voices I trusted that it was not only an interesting and accomplished work, but that it was also really exciting and intense. But, still, I didn’t watch it for some reason. Finally, most recently, about a year ago, his Infinity Pool made a splash (whoops – sorry, ugh), dividing audience opinions, but sounding absolutely intriguing, and did I rush out to the cinema to see it? No, of course not. Why? Who knows? I am a mystery even unto myself.
Anyway, this week, I just want to jump in with both feet and give my first impressions on his catalogue as it currently stands. I haven’t watched any of these movies yet, so I don’t know what I’ll think, but I sure hope I’ll like them. Either way, I’m going to try to keep this short. I usually run on longer than intended, and it means I don’t publish nearly as often as I’d like, so these will be off the cuff and to the point. If there’s something there, I reserve the right to return to it sometime in the future in depth.
And of course, there will probably be some spoilers…
Antiviral (2012)
What an interesting idea: It’s the near future and society’s obsession with celebrities has ballooned to wild new proportions. Butchers sell hunks of protein grown from the harvested cells of famous people, fans can indulge their darker impulses in computer generated interactions with their celebrity crushes wherein they can dominate, humiliate and/or torture them, and most significant for our story, there is a thriving market in viruses collected from the famous that people pay big bucks to have themselves infected with, attaining a biological intimacy with the objects of their fascination. The companies that buy and distribute these illnesses put them through a copy protection process to make them non-contagious so no one can contract some starlet’s herpes or stomach flu for free. But of course, with such a limited good, there is a thriving black market in hacked viruses.
Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for a virus selling clinic and regularly infects himself with their wares to smuggle them out of the premises so that at home he can use a stolen machine to crack their copy protections and sell them to an illicit distributer. He is an intriguing figure, a cipher at the heart of the story. He is always terribly ill, and there is a kind of mystery that runs through it all of what exactly he gets from this. Does he need the money that badly? Is he some kind of celebrity obsessive as well? By the end of the film, it is revealed, but not understanding where he’s coming from is really surprisingly compelling. And Landry Jones is so very good in the role, exuding a weird, sickly charisma throughout. He is pale and clammy and disgusting, but also captivatingly intense in a quiet, broken way. It’s a great performance and it left me wondering what he’s been up to in recent years. I feel like he was exploding in the 2010’s, but I haven’t seen him in a while. I hope he’s ok and not infected with a terrible celebrity illness (I just checked – he’s alive and working – good).
Anyway, Syd is sent to harvest a pathogen from one particular star, and in the process, before the virus has been copy-protected, he steals some, directly injecting a bit of her blood into his veins. You might say this was a mistake as, after he wakes up from what might have been a mini-coma, he sees a news report that she’s died of a mysterious disease, and all of a sudden, he’s thrust into the twists and turns of a conspiracy/corporate espionage thriller as various figures hound and kidnap him, all seeking the valuable commodity flowing through his vascular system. Also, he’s probably going to die.
Sadly, whereas the first act had totally enraptured me and I was so taken with the initial ideas, particularly the interrogation of what celebrity even is and how it connects with other motivating works of the imaginary, more than one character likening it to a kind of faith, in the second act, I just got a bit lost in the circuities of the plot. There is rather a lot of plot. Maybe too much plot. I faded a bit… But in the end, I’d say the final act clicked into place, with Syd regaining control of his story, the concept of celebrity as a kind of cannibalistic fetishism taken to its logical conclusion and, in a private moment, Syd’s compulsive motivations are revealed. It was a satisfying ending, though it was a shame that I had drifted somewhat along the way.
But I’ve gotta say, as a first feature, wow – I’m impressed. It has a bold, confident visual style; it is full of ideas (and Brandon Cronenberg wrote it in addition to directing, so he deserves full credit for exploring those ideas); and while it is impossible not to compare it to the work of his father (there is obvious common ground between this film and other works that play in the borderlands of biology, identity, and technology such as Videodrome, Rabid, or Existenz), I also think a clear authorial voice can be heard. It’s also interesting that the first film of an artist who knows he’s working under his father’s long shadow is entirely focused on the idea of famousness. I’m super curious to watch the next couple of movies and see how he’s developed since his debut.
Possessor (2020)
I think it’s easy to read artistic growth from Antiviral to this. Though the first film impressed me, this one (also both written and directed by Cronenberg) really got under my skin. Again, we have a high concept sci-fi, near future horror-thriller premise, but whereas I felt the big ideas in the first film ended up getting somewhat sidelined by the corporate espionage plot in the second act, in this case, the central conceptual issue just metastasizes throughout the film, with a haunting and horrific payoff by the end. It was all a fascinating, intense ride that was both intellectually challenging and emotionally weighted, with moments of thrilling excitement and horrific acts of violence or violation of self. I was captivated start to finish and it left me in an odd state for a while afterwards.
This time, our protagonist, Tasya Vos (played by Andrea Riseborough, among others) is a fancy assassin whose consciousness is technologically implanted into the brains of unwitting patsies that she rides to get access to high level targets, eliminating them and then getting pulled back to her own body as she makes her host commit suicide, thus fully severing the connection. You get the impression that she is very good at her job, but that it has taken a toll on her psychologically and emotionally. Her relationships are strained at best – it’s as if when she’s in her own body with her husband and son, she is merely playing the role of “Tasya,” and it is a role for which she must prepare, practicing her lines in advance, getting her vocal inflections right for this character, this job: herself. And the job comes with her in other ways. In moments of intimacy, whether sexual or filial, she flashes on violent memories of time she’d recently spent in a host.
Similarly, when we see her do her job and enter a new person (which is not only physical – she must study that person’s life, relationships, and mannerisms to be able to slip into them for days without raising flags), there is a difficult process of adjustment, finding her new legs both metaphorically and literally. This process is not easy or obvious. No matter how much a host has been studied in advance, upon taking over, it is impossible to fully recreate their persona, and when, for example, a host’s girlfriend questions why he’s acting so strangely, it is a high stakes, deeply emotional improv game to maintain the illusion with one who knows that host so well. Similarly, there are basic corporeal elements at play, such as simply living within a new physical form, sometimes with different parts – a sex scene which she has in a male body is more than a bit of a trip – for her and for us.
And it must be said that while Riseborough is excellent when we see her, most of the film consists of Tasya in another body, that of Colin Tate, and that therefore, she is largely portrayed by Christopher Abbott, who does such a nuanced job of playing her playing him. This is a concept that lends itself to rich, subtle performances (Jennifer Jason Lee also stands out as Tasya’s handler) – a big sci-fi idea that depends not on special effects, but on special actors.
Of course, the job goes south (otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie), and the lines between Tasya and Colin begin to blur. Beyond that, the very idea that Tasya (or anyone for that matter) is a whole person, with full agency and will, is called into question. As the film goes on, we see her more and more untethered – something that may be occurring due to circumstances of the plot, but also may be the state she has been living in for some time, but is only now coming into unsettling focus.
All of this sets up the sci-fi thriller premise, but it must be said that the horror is strong here – both in an exploration of a horrific experience of losing or at least questioning one’s self, but also in shocking moments of tragic violence, as well as a disturbing presentation of the degree to which the individual is not at all inviolable, but is only ever an impermanent approximation, existing temporarily in a web of physical and social contexts. This is largely played out in performance, but it also gets pretty trippy at times, and I must commend Cronenberg’s fascinating visual elements, mostly filmed in camera with practical effects, which is always refreshing, but here feels particularly significant. In a film this concerned with corporeality, I think an over reliance on CGI would be detrimental.
As I wrote earlier, this exploration of what it is to be a mind in a body plays out over the course of the story, but it must be said, that while the film is big in ideas, and does maintain a kind of hypnotic vibe, that doesn’t make it some kind of art film, prioritizing philosophy over narrative – interesting, but heady and sleep inducing. This is a suspenseful, emotional, and intense movie, and its conclusion, lands with a bleakly chilling gut punch.
A fascinating viewing experience, it really planted itself in my head, leaving me in an uncanny mood, feeling a bit odd in my own body for some time after the credits had rolled. I guess a film must be good if it inspires a minor fugue state, right?
Finally, I keep finding myself coming back to the question of how I might characterize Brandon Cronenberg and how his work should be distinguished from his father’s. There are a great deal of similarities so far. It’s like he’s carrying on the family business of “body horror that philosophically interrogates psychology,” and what a family business – some people just go into shoemaking or accounting or something. But still, I hesitate. It feels facile to simply note how they are thematically similar. There is clearly a mind at work here and it seems unfairly reductive to mention his dad so much when these films have been so strong. Perhaps after watching his third flick, I’ll be better prepared to put my finger on his oeuvre.
Infinity Pool (2023)
As mentioned earlier, when this came out last year, it divided audiences, so I came to it prepared for something, I don’t know, divisive. What I found was a hell of a movie. I wonder if it so split opinion because it was simply Cronenberg’s most widely released and marketed film to date (Antiviral being a first feature, Possessor being a pandemic release, and Infinity Pool starring Alexander Skarsgård, a pretty well-known actor and Mia Goth, who has been knocking it out of the park lately), thus bringing in a wider audience, not all of whom might have been up for what they got. In any case, I loved it. But before getting into it, I must say that for the first two films I was generally able to dance around the plot without really spoiling much – I feel that with this one, I’m going to have to reveal certain details, so if you think you might be interested in seeing it, go do it now. It’s available in many places, though I don’t know which version you’ll get (as with Possessor, there is an R-rated cut and an original cut with more explicit sexual and violent imagery) – I rented the uncut version from the production company’s website – and if you get geo-blocked, as I did, living in Poland, my VPN worked for it just fine.
Skarsgård plays James Foster, a novelist who published his first book seven years ago and is struggling to produce a second one. Seeking inspiration, he and his wife, Em, the daughter of his publisher, have gone on vacation to a gated resort in the fictional country of Li Tolqa (shot mostly in and around the Croatian town of Šibenik – which I visited in 2022, about a year after filming). This invented country seems to have fascinating cultural practices, but all that Foster, or for that matter, we, can see are those that are cultivated for tourists, either as gift shop masks, or as economic exchange, the locals literally selling their lives for the entertainment of rich foreigners. At the start of the film, Foster is clearly lost and depressed – going to a tourist resort that offers the most superficial presentation of culture while drinking champagne with the breakfast buffet and lounging by the pool can be pleasant, but unsurprisingly stirs no creative juices – and he doubts if there is even anything within to be stirred. Having married into money, perhaps he is simply now a member of the idle rich, producing nothing of value, empty inside, living a squalid, meaningless life of luxury.
And so, he is given a jolt when they meet another couple at the resort, Alban and Gabi (Mia Goth), who says she’s a huge fan of his novel and is desperately waiting for him to publish again. He is drawn to the seductively frank Gabi, her unfiltered interest in him stroking James’s ego (while she literally strokes other things – at least in the uncut version) and inciting a dangerous risk-taking in him as he drags his wife out of the guarded resort compound for a day trip with the other two into the wilder environs of the country they’ve come to visit – which just means grilling and getting drunk on a beach down the road from their hotel. But then, driving back at night, he hits and kills a local farmer, and that is what really begins our story.
Li Tolqa is a country with a very traditional sense of justice and the local law is that in the case of such a killing, the eldest son of the victim has the right to kill the assailant. However, the country also has an interesting history of folk traditions, mixed with surprisingly modern cloning technology. Earlier in the film, we saw a taste of a local ritual with grotesque masks that revolves around a kind of doubling of character. That has developed into a modern practice of high capitalism wherein they offer Foster the option to have himself cloned, the clone implanted with all of his memories and guilt for the crime, and having that clone killed in his place.
I wonder what the practice was before cloning was perfected – was someone masked in the place of the killer and thus executed? Would that masked person volunteer and their family be compensated or were they discarded serfs without any rights? We’ll never know though as, tourists ourselves, we only know of the extraordinarily expensive service offered to Foster, one that he is willing to avail himself of.
One gets the sense that this cloned execution procedure is a key part of the local economy. We are told that Li Tolqa is a very poor country and that it is dangerous beyond the barbed wire fences of the hotel compound. We understand that tourism is vital to local GDP, and I think this is just another kind of tourism – this is the sort of place where rich westerners can come to behave extraordinarily badly and just pay a financial fee to be excused, exploiting a local population that offers themselves up for that exploitation, for abuse or even death, so profitable is the practice.
Foster is not as horrified at the sight of having himself killed as one might expect. In fact, while his wife is traumatized, he seems happy – finally free, and not just from punishment, but of himself – that schmuck who couldn’t write is dead. Good riddance. Soon he finds himself falling in with a group of terrible, wealthy tourists, pulled their by Gabi, who all embark on acts of debauchery and brutality, safe in the knowledge that they can always pay to have another clone produced and dispatched. They are just having the best time, causing all sorts of trouble for the local people, and James follows Gabi deeper and deeper into their midst, her mask being lowered so slowly that it is hard to pinpoint the truth of her from one moment to the next – it’s a really nicely navigated performance.
For one who has been so disappointed in himself, who already felt creatively and emotionally barren, there is a tempting freedom in this act of self-destruction, killing the failure he once was, now free to hedonistically indulge with no shame, with no concept of ambition or ethics or value. Once haunted by imposter syndrome, he finds that weight lifted from him by means of a literal imposter – who is also, actually, himself – but of course, it does not go well for the imposter.
Whereas in Possessor, one body was being fought over by two personas, each of whom lost something of themselves in the process, here, James instead splits himself, again and again. It is freeing, but perhaps something is erased as well. The film regularly plays with doubts as to who is “real” and who is a copy – characters directly discuss the possibility that they are actually being killed and that the clones are left in their place. That may be, but is never established one way or another, and I don’t think it’s important. I think everything is real and everything is a sham.
By the end, James seems to have been left a husk, hollowed out by this self-destructive experience, but wasn’t he already at the beginning – has this changed him for the worst, or simply revealed to him the degree to which he had already (maybe even always?) been absent? All of the other tourists seem to be having so much fun, and while he goes on this journey with them, and behaves just as badly, he is haunted and miserable. Why the difference? Are they simply gleeful monsters or does his failure to enjoy himself make him somehow worse than them? They all do terrible things, but at least they are enjoying themselves – he is just miserably trying to disappear. And aren’t we, the viewers, implicated in their entertainment: emotional tourists of horrors inflicted on others, and when all is said and done, we just go back to our normal lives, having a laugh, untouched?
I will say that the very ending didn’t blow me away as much as most of the run time had done, but that as a whole, this was quite the ride. The ideas, which still circle around many similar themes from the first two works (bodies, identity, sense and loss of self – all run through with fleshy violence and explicit sexual imagery) are thought provoking and I was emotionally involved in James’s story. Skarsgård and Goth are both great, and the visual style of the film is striking, with crisp, intriguing cinematography and experimental, hallucinatory sequences that get quite creative, and again, Cronenberg leans into practical make-up effects and in-camera visual techniques, and it is a pleasure to see something that feels so solid, even when it’s disorienting and ethereal. This seems at odds, but I think it’s true.
I loved it. The continued play with dividing and questioning the idea of the ‘self’ lands emotionally. The exploration of economic, cultural exploitation rings true – I particularly love how little we actually learn of the fictional setting – as tourists, we merely skate on the surface and are intrigued and enticed by the sense of hidden depths, but feel no need to dig deeper and actually invest thought or energy in learning something. Finally, the drama of James’s self-doubt and the lure of a total freedom from responsibility connected for me – I think it’s something many could experience, though few have the capital resources to follow through on as he does (also, the cloning technology isn’t quite there yet).
For me, I experienced a small taste of something like this during the pandemic: I, like many, can struggle with such an ‘imposter syndrome’ – am I ever doing anything truly worthwhile – artistically, in the theatre, writing this blog, in my teaching, in my interactions with others, or am I just idle, greedy, lazy, indulging in things I like for my own self-serving pleasure? I can only assume this is a commonly felt anxiety and that it’s not just me. But when we weren’t supposed to go anywhere or do anything, and the way we were asked to “help” was to essentially stay home and chill out, I felt a real kind of freedom – no need to perform, to achieve, to plan for the future, or even really imagine it – just read books, watch films, listen to music, exercise, bake bread, work online, and hangout with my wife and my cat – it was a kind of low-ambition bliss that I’d never before felt so allowed to enjoy and that was really hard to come back from. I have (I guess), but it wasn’t automatic. It took effort to get more involved in the world beyond my own four walls again (and now I’m back to feeling guiltily inadequate – that I don’t do enough – artistically, politically, intellectually).
But personal tangents aside, this was a great movie. If you haven’t watched it yet, I hope I haven’t spoiled it for you – go give it a try.
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Yeesh – I’d said I wanted this to be a short, “off the cuff” post, and now, 4,000 words later, we’re still here. But I’m glad to have finally dug into this filmmaker I’d long been interested in and somehow had not yet at all explored – a good project for a week. Which brings me, of course, back to that essential question of how I describe his work, and how I think it might be discussed in comparison to that of his father’s. So first of all, having watched these three films, I think Brandon Cronenberg is a really significant new voice in horror, whose name should come up when people discuss the Ari Asters and Robert Eggerses of the world. He is making really interesting and engaging sci-fi/horror, and really capitalizing on the promise of both halves of that sub-genre. For me, the best sci-fi need not include spaceships or robots, but simply involves positing some technologically based possibility that lets us explore an idea – for an individual, for society, etc. Horror invites us to dwell in a dark place, taking some difficult emotion and following it to its natural conclusion, allowing it to develop into something more than natural, something monstrous or mythic. Cronenberg is doing both of these things, and making exciting, intriguing, visually striking stories to boot (writing this post, I find myself overusing and unable to find enough synonyms for ‘interesting,’ ‘intriguing,’ and ‘fascinating’ – that says something about the nature of the work).
Of course, this is quite a similar sandbox to that which his father, David Cronenberg, has long played in, and there are striking overlaps of their recurring themes. In both cases, the physical body is often foregrounded – flesh is important, as is the breaching of its boundaries, which means sex and violence are front and center. And all of this focus on corporeality results in an exploration of the mind and how its sanctity, its permanence, its sense of being discrete and whole might be re-imagined, challenged, or even abandoned. Furthermore, at a higher level of abstraction, commerce often becomes involved – a meeting place of desire and physical reality, with the body and self in play. In both creators’ work there is a tension between a cerebral, philosophical exploration and a visceral emotionality. Yeah – in many ways, their work is not all that dissimilar.
And yet, their films do certainly feel different to me – and clearly have different minds behind them. One aspect of difference may simply be technical – between film stocks and the capabilities of special effects, a body horror/sci-fi piece made in the late 70s/early 80s is bound to look different than one made forty years later. But there is also a difference of mood that is difficult for me to specify. Perhaps one of these days I’ll have to return to the father in the form of some kind of filmic retrospective to see if I can put it in words, but for now, I just feel that though they both circle around similar ideas, if I were to watch a future film by one of them and not be told which had made it, I expect I’d be able to guess, so specific are their respective creative fingerprints. I fear this is a cop out of sorts, but for now, it’s the best I’ve got.
Either way though, I think I can safely say that both have earned the cost of a ticket from me for anything they make going forward.
