Brandon Cronenberg’s worlds, with their squelchy, gooey special effects and terrifying societal constructs, tend to stick with you long after they end.
His first feature, 2012’s Antiviral, introduces an obsessive pop culture landscape in which megafans are injected with copies of pathogens taken from celebrities so that they might feel a closer connection to them. following casts of rich assholes as they make their own vacations miserable, and films like The Menu skewering the patrons and even the staff of fussy concept restaurants. Cronenberg admits it’s weird that it’s coming out all at the same time, but doesn’t necessarily see a pattern.
“It’s tempting to say people are frustrated and anxious because of an increasing economic divide, and everybody’s worried about the future and everybody’s enraged,” he allows. “I’m sure that’s true. And maybe that’s fueling the success of these things. But film moves at such an incredibly glacial pace that you can’t really decide to time it that way. I was doing the original writing for the story as far back as 2014, or maybe earlier. By the time you’ve written something, and then years have gone by, where you’re developing it and casting it, the actual timing of the release is completely out of your hands. It’s just sort of a weird coincidence that there’s this wave of stuff coming out now.”
Photo by Corey Nickols/Getty Images
So, there’s no director groupchat secretly planning to drop these projects all at once?
“I can neither confirm nor deny.”
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