Brandon Cronenberg

  • Possessor (2020)

    Possessor (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Fiction genres are tricky in that they can be as much about content than tone. Science Fiction, for instance, can be about “stories in the future,” but SF can also be about a way to tell a story, with unspoken but strong conventions as to which kind of approach is forbidden. Along those lines, it’s interesting to see something like Possessor pop up, telling us a familiar story of jacked-in assassins taking over other people’s bodies, but doing so in a way that owes a lot more to gory body horror than traditional SF. It’s almost too easy to point out that it’s from Brandon “Son of David” Cronenberg — but with his filmography so far, younger Cronenberg seems to be tackling topics very similar to the earlier films of his father. Possessor is kin to his earlier Antiviral in being put together in a way that’s deliberately off-putting to viewers. A mixture of gore, blood, violent imagery, unpleasant topics, droning soundtrack and actors put in unglamorous makeup, it’s a familiar story told in unfamiliar ways, with a mean attitude and an unforgiving finale. Never mind the assassination plot having to do with a corporate takeover: the core of the film is in the way the lead character is manipulated in getting rid of anything tying her back to humanity. It’s both unpleasant to watch (you’ve never seen Andrea Riseborough look so awful, or Jennifer Jason Lee playing such a falsely-frumpy middle manager, or Tuppence Middleton being put through such a wringer) and unnerving in how it goes from one uncomfortable set-piece to another. The body-snatching assassin thing is almost a common trope, but few other films have consciously looked into the anti-heroic, anti-power-fantasy flip-side of such things. The toll of the job is immense, and the film goes in a very different, almost decidedly noir nihilism in solving the conflict. I’m not sure I’m ever going to see Possessor again, but I’m not at all indifferent to the result.

  • Antiviral (2012)

    Antiviral (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2013) So the “Best Cronenberg movie not directed by Cronenberg” award goes to… Cronenberg.  Brandon Cronenberg, that is: son of David, who’s been on an extended break from his body-horror shtick for a bit more than a decade but who finds his own tradition more than upheld by his writer/director progeny.  By targeting celebrity worship through willingly transmitted diseases, Cronenberg-fils’ Antiviral certainly goes for the gross: people with a sensitivity to seeing graphic close-ups of needles breaking skin, coughed blood, quasi-cannibalism, virulently sick people and other joyous expressions of the frailty of human flesh may want to steer far away from this film.  The clinically white-dominated direction is as cold as its characters, which is both unnerving and easy to dismiss.  For all of its strengths and ideas, Antiviral just doesn’t work as well as it should.  While Caleb Landry Jones is a special effect of his own as the red-headed, spectacularly-freckled protagonist, he’s saddled with a script that doesn’t give him much to do but act sick and mumble lines enigmatically.  As a result, Antiviral is watched at a remove, as it features unpleasant characters doing even more unpleasant things to themselves and each other.  There are no heroes (and fewer sympathetic victims than you’d expect): one wonders if a better movie about ideas of celebrity worship could have been achieved through the viewpoint of someone becomes a celebrity without intending to.  Alas, this would have required quite a bit more emotions that are on display here.  While Cronenberg has enough directing skill and writing ideas to maintain interest in Antiviral from beginning to end, it’s not as successful as it could have been.