Welcome to my Antiviral fanpage!!
This movie is super special and close to my heart!! :3 I love all the allegories and imagery in it, also I am just absolutely obsessed with the aesthetic and the characters... Please be aware that this page spoils the entire movie!! If you want to watch it blind (which I highly recommend) go back to the homepage!
Plot
Syd March is an employee at the Lucas Clinic, a place that sells celebrities' illnesses to fans, who willingly let themselves be infected to feel closer to their idols. He profits from this obsession, not only through regular paychecks, but also by illegally selling the clinic's pathogens on the black market. To achieve this despite his workplace's strict security measures, he injects himself with the viruses. After decoding the copy protection placed on the diseases, he sells them to Arvid, owner of Astral Bodies, a shop for artificially grown celebrity meat.
Everything changes, however, when his coworker, Derek, is arrested for the same crime. Suddenly, Syd is responsible for harvesting the pathogens from Hannah Geist, the clinic's most popular celebrity. Immediately, he seizes the opportunity and injects himself with Hannah's blood. However, this turns out to be a terrible mistake. The virus not only breaks his decoding console and makes him feel incredibly sick - the next day, it is announced that Hannah has died from her illness.
Over night, the Hannah-hype reaches unimagineable levels. Syd, desperate to repair his console quickly in order to sell the now highly sought after virus, seeks out Arvid's help. He leads him to Levine, leader of another piracy group, who offers to trade him the missing console part in exchange for his infected blood. After Syd refuses, he is forcefully subdued, and Arvid helps Levine take blood and skin samples from him.
As if that wasn't enough, the morning after, he is kidnapped by two strangers, who take him to a remote mansion. It is revealed to Syd that Hannah hasn't actually died; the virus turned out to be a modified version of an earlier illness Hannah suffered, programmed to be deadly and incurable. To prevent another apparent assassination attempt, Hannah's death was faked, and she is now being treated by Doctor Abendroth. Things are looking dim for Syd: Hannah already seems to be in the end-stage of her illness, bleeding from her mouth, suffering intense hallucinations and delusions, unable to sleep, in a state of constant delirium. He is urged to cooperate and find out who created the illness, which he agrees to in return for his missing console piece.
As a result of his investigations, Syd finds out that it was Derek who programmed the virus for Lucas' rival clinic, Vole & Tesser, who also patented the disease. Soon after this discovery, however, he is kidnapped once again, this time by Levine, and locked up in a white room equipped with cameras. Levine reveals his plan of livestreaming Syd's slow death, profiting from Hannah's fans who were 'robbed' of watching her die. Syd, however, manages to escape by stabbing Levine in the mouth with a syringe and using his infected blood to deter people from touching him. He threatens his way into a call with Vole & Tesser's owner, Ms. Tesser, and reveals to her that he has figured out her plan: by infecting Hannah with their own patented disease, they could bypass the exclusive contract Lucas has with her. However, during the programming process, a mistake occured, rendering the disease more dangerous than intended. Ms. Tesser tells him that they could develop a cure for his condition, but it would be costly, and she feels no obligation to cure him.
It is then that Syd reveals to her that Hannah is still alive, offering her to the company in exchange for the cure. After visiting her at the mansion, Ms. Tesser argues that Hannah is too far gone to be cured; Syd, however, proposes a different plan. Using Arvid's artifical meat growing technology, a (presumably) comatose, though still alive Hannah is locked up in a cell garden chamber, where her body will infinitely sprout new flesh for Vole & Tesser to infect and sell. The film ends with Syd, now a high-position employee at the company, cutting into Hannah's arm and drinking her blood.
Characters
(scroll gifs for info!)
Syd March
Syd starts out as an employee at the Lucas Clinic. He is neither loved nor hated by his colleagues; he is pretty much invisible to them, barely engaging in chatter. This leads to his (older) colleagues to perceive him as somewhat of a naive, young guy, often speaking for him instead of asking him directly.
Despite this, he is a highly successful salesperson (when he isn't dying in front of his clients), his manipulative nature making it easy for him to convince customers to buy the most expensive option. He also seems pretty skilled at using the Readyface Console, at least skilled enough for Lucas (the CEO) to let him operate it during product showcases, which is probably due to him independently using it for piracy.
Throughout the film, he often seems to think of himself as better or smarter than the average person, never engaging in celebrity gossip and generally appearing disinterested in the lives of the people whose viruses he sells. This facade cracks more and more, though, as he gets increasingly obsessed with Hannah, watching her funeral, reading articles about her, or consuming her flesh and blood for no apparent rational reason. Even Dr. Abendroth calls him out for it, referring to him as 'just another fan'.
While he was mostly led by survival instinct through much of the narrative, as he gains more power, he also indulges more in 'irrational' obsessive behavior. In the end, he is a pretty terrible person, but... he's special :3 to me...
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Hannah Geist
We don't learn a lot about Hannah throughout the movie - not even the reason why she's famous, in the first place. She is entirely a product to be sold to fans, especially apparent when you consider that the majority of her dialogue wasn't even spoken by her, but rather computer generated by various people and companies.
During all her scenes, she always lacks agency, being more a pawn pushed back and forth between different players. Her only real dialogue is spoken while she is already on the verge of death, and all she does is talk about her disease.
Not even the people closest to her have any respect for her. Dr. Abendroth had an artficially grown patch of her skin grafted onto his arm. Syd is completely lost in his fantasy of her, to the point of lacking any respect and invading her privacy (both in reality and in his mind) several times. We never learn anything about her family or friends, aside from an off-hand (and blatantly untrue) comment about an alleged boyfriend of hers.
Yeah... she's doomed by the narrative. Haunting the narrative. Whatever Tumblr people say these days
Arvid
Arvid specializes in synthetically growing celebrity meat from muscle cells, taking a lot of pride in his work, not only selling his product directly to customers but also to high-class restaurants. It is he who inspired (and possibly invented) the technology Syd sells to Vole & Tesser by the end.
His relationship to Syd, though somewhat sympathetic, is also purely conditional. He is selfish and greedy, not unlike pretty much every other character, shown by him feeling no obligation to buy the same product from Syd that he already received from (presumably) Derek, as well as him feeling no apparent remorse for forcefully harvesting his blood together with Levine. Their friendly relationship is one-sided; while Syd appears to trust Arvid a lot, his subsequent betrayal visibly hurting him, it seems that Arvid never saw much more in him than the profits he brings.
It is unclear how Arvid feels about the celebrity hype. Obviously, he loves the money it brings his business, but beyond that, he isn't really shown engaging in conversations about their private lives. Maybe he is just a businessman. A very smart and manipulative businessman. I love him.
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Levine
Levine is the leader of a piracy group, running a club(?) under his name that holds quite a lot of new innovations, including a Readyface Console he built entirely by himself, as well as an interactive box displaying a computer generated live video of Hannah Geist after her 'death', making it seem like she's actually trapped inside.
He is an acquaintance, business partner and possibly friend of Arvid, shown by Arvid letting him in on his discovery that Syd is infected with Hannah's virus and being willing to share it with him. Levine describes himself as an innovator and 'rat man', calling his own work gross but saying it's that way on purpose. It was him who came up with the livestream, working with Vole & Tesser to realize his idea.
Similar to Syd, he appears to view himself as above the average person, taking a lot of pride in his technological skills and so-called clever ideas. He seems to have a bit of a god complex, too, and his perceived invincibility eventually became his downfall as he let his guard down next to Syd.
What can I say. Insane slightly manic science guy who makes bad jokes....
This page is a work in progress! Check back later for more content :D All (movie related) graphics on here were made by me but feel free to steal :>