The End Is Always Messy

I like a good dystopia. It’s nice to sit down to a vision of collapse that’s way, way worse than anything my anxieties can conjure up – or just see what a given filmmaker brings to the genre’s essential challenge of “us, but not quite.”

Last week, Severin Films released its mass-market 4K editions of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen and Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral – two very specific takes on dystopia separated by two decades, an ocean and a few other things. They make a fascinating double-bill, since both pictures are endlessly fascinated by the fragility and mutability of flesh, either from within or without. And neither is afraid to go dark.

Delicatessen opens with the world having already ended – quite a while ago, given the age of the cars and clothes – leaving just a handful of people sitting around in the ruins of an apartment complex where they busy themselves with pointless tasks while M. Clapet (Jean-Claude Dreyfus), their landlord, waits for the next stranger to come around looking for work. M. Clapet is also a butcher, you see, and the sole provider of sustenance for his tenants … who’ve learned not to question how he comes by his meat.

But their latest visitor, a circus performer called Louison (Dominique Pinon), is quite resourceful, and Clapet’s sweet-natured daughter Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac) finds him charming. This complicates things in the building – though not for M. Clapet, who plans to serve up Lousion at the first opportunity. It’s up to Louison’s fellow tenants to save him from Clapet’s cleaver without incurring his wrath themselves.

There aren’t many post-apocalyptic movies that can be hailed for their playful sense of abandon –Night of the Comet, maybe? – but when Jeunet and Caro brought Delicatessen to film festivals in 1991, it was embraced for its whimsy and its mayhem, which work in concert to take the audience somewhere they’ve never been before.

One of its earliest fans was Terry Gilliam, who appears in Severin’s bonus features discussing his role in getting Delicatessen a North American release … and of course he was. It’s a love story with cannibalism and civil engineering, it’s right up his street.

Up an entirely different street we’ll find Antiviral, which takes us to a dystopia in progress.

Technically, the world has not ended in Brandon Cronenberg’s 2012 debut, but it’s in the post; something essential has been abandoned, it seems, and as a result people have grown unfathomably distant from one another; the only way to connect is to literally share someone’s illness, ideally that of a celebrity.

That’s what Syd (Caleb Landry Jones) spends his time doing, chasing down the viruses and bacteria of the rich and famous. His latest infatuation is superstar Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon), who’s recently come down with something very new and very dangerous. But that just makes it even more valuable, and Syd’s attempts to unlock the pathogen – which he’s injected into his own body so he can smuggle it out of his employer’s reach – wind up thrusting him into the middle of a conspiracy that’s all kinds of grotesque.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Antiviral, which offered a striking visual aesthetic and a fascinating hook but often felt like a demo reel for itself, ironically never getting more than skin-deep into its story of mutation and conspiracy; now, of course, it also feels like a test run for Cronenberg’s subsequent Possessor and Infinity Pool, which also revolve around disaffected characters whose bodies are hijacked and/or mutilated against their will.

But if you’re a fan, you’ll find a lot to appreciate about Severin’s new 4K restoration, which if nothing else treats Karim Hussain’s cinematography with the proper respect. Where previous DVD and Blu-ray transfers looked a little too clean, the UHD edition of Antiviral brings a much wider dynamic range to the image, revealing sickly gradients of off-white in its austere, engineered environs. The whole world is unwell; Syd’s side hustle as a disease broker is just a symptom.

Cronenberg and Hussain discuss restoring their vision in a new interview, “Reviving a Dead Cell,” while archival extras include deleted scenes, an EPK and the extras produced for the IFC and Alliance Films discs in 2013 – audio commentary from Cronenberg and Hussain, a few brief featurettes and a pretty decent half-hour documentary, “Anatomy of a Virus.” Severin also throws in Cronenberg’s 2008 short film Broken Tulips, which served as a test run for a key scene.

The Delicatessen upgrade is more revelatory, with the added definition of the 2160p master and the wider color gamut of HDR coming together to showcase Darius Khondji’s images in all their jaundiced glory. The StudioCanal Blu-ray was an improvement over the earlier DVD, but this is an even more accurate presentation of the film as film; grainy, hazy, sickly but still somehow beautiful. (The soundtrack is presented in DTS-HD 5.1 in what feels like an organic remix of the matrixed surround audio.)

The supplements on the Delicatessen special edition are a similar mix of old and new, with the aforementioned Terry Gilliam interview and new sit-downs Jeunet and Caro joining the Jeunet audio commentary and making-of featurette (“Fine Cooked Meats”) from that StudioCanal Blu-ray. But I should also point out that these editions of Antiviral and Delicatessen are more modest versions of the three-disc sets from Severin’s Black Friday sale last November.

The mass-market editions offer the 4K and Blu-ray feature discs without the additional Blu-ray packaged in the Black Friday sets. So, absent from this edition of Delicatessen are Jeunet and Caro’s short film Le Bunker de la Dernière Rafale, an interview with Jean-Claude Dreyfus and a number of special features from the 2010 Studio Canal Blu-ray, including the excellent hour-long retrospective documentary “Main Course Pieces,” while Antiviral loses the slightly longer Cannes cut of the feature and some thermal test footage.

The Black Friday limited editions are still available directly from Severin at the links in the above graph; one might also keep one’s eye out for a gently used StudioCanal Blu-ray of Delicatessen, as people upgrade their collections without reading the specs too carefully. But that’s why you’re reading this, of course.

Antiviral and Delicatessen are available now in 4K/Blu-ray combos from Severin Films.

Up next: The weight of Babygirl and The Brutalist and the lighter fare of Companion and Love Hurts strike an odd balance on the new-release shelves. Stay tuned!