Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) is a salesman for The Lucas Clinic, a company that takes infections from celebrities and sells them to their fans. Yes, it’s possible to get sick from your obsessions or even eat meat harvested from their cells.

Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) is the company’s most famous celebrity, and her pathogens remain big sellers as her health falters. When her exclusive procurer, Derek Lessing (Reid Morgan), is fired, Syd takes over. Yet, he’s already in over his head as he’s been using his own body to carry a variety of illnesses, including one that he’s injected from Hannah that causes a series of hallucinations. He intends to sell the sickness to Arvid (Jon Pingue), whose butcher company, Astral Bodies, sells meat from human cells. But when he loses his laptop and Hannah dies from the same illness in his bloodstream, he must find out who has created a new sickness that no one can classify.

Malcolm McDowell is Dr. Abendroth, Hannah’s personal doctor and a man who has grafted her skin onto his body. There’s also the rival company Vole & Tesser, which is fighting The Lucas Clinic to be the leader in celebrity contagion.

While I wasn’t a fan of the young Cronenberg films, I enjoyed this. It has such a great concept and feels like the closest we’ve had to an ancient future movie in some time, such as the ’90s and ’00s weirdness of movies like Freejack and Paycheck, but much better. It’s a world that I wish there were more movies inside, a strange and downbeat yet weirdly hopeful slice of biomechanical celebrity worship.

The Severin release of Antiviral is scanned in 4K from the 35mm protection internegative, supervised by Brandon Cronenberg and cinematographer Karim Hussain, with 3 hours of new and archival special features including commentary by Cronenberg and Hussain; Broken Tulips, a short film by Cronenberg; a making of feature; a discussion of the restoration process; deleted scenes; an interview with production designer Arvinder Greywal; an electronic press kit; the Cannes cut of the film with an introduction by Cronenberg and a thermal camera test. You can get this from Severin.