Antiviral, review - Telegraph 15 cert, 103 min. Dir Brandon Cronenberg starring Caleb Landry Jones, Sarah Gadon, Malcolm McDowell David Cronenberg may have an unlikely competitor in the field of making your skin crawl, if the excellent debut feature by his son Brandon is anything to go by. Antiviral, an eye-widening delve into conceptual science fiction, has the gruesome verve of Cronenberg Sr's early work, and morbidity to match. It won't do to shrug it off as a jejune clone of dad's low-budget body-horror pictures (Shivers, Rabid), because there's real muscle in its ideas, a potent kind of satirical despair, and a level of craft you rarely expect from a first-timer. Celebrity obsession has tipped over the edge in this chilly vision of the near-future, where biotech firms compete to harvest stars" ailments - cold sores, STDs, even fatal viruses - and pass them on to paying fans. Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) is a technician for The Lucas Clinic, whose prize asset is a cover girl called Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), an icily perfect blonde whose blood Syd regularly collects for this thoroughly icky purpose. Syd is embezzling within the company by secretly injecting himself with some of this "product" and selling his own newly infected tissue on the black market, but he goes too far when one especially virulent bug kills Hannah off. Imagine a poutier, even frecklier Eddie Redmayne, and you're halfway to Jones's alien looks, which Cronenberg isolates against yards of white wall for effect. The movie is more thinkpiece than thriller, and the plot sometimes coasts a little, but it has a horrific Orwellian suggestiveness and the coldly arresting style to back it up. Like all the best science fiction, it speaks directly to our age and feels like a hideous warning: if this film's fixation on celebrity bodies disgusts, it is merely taking its cue from the likes of The National Enquirer and its ilk. It's also proof that there's room for more than one brainy provocateur in the Cronenberg gene-pool.