Although, perhaps, not to everyone's taste, I decided to observe the end of 2020 with a movie about a New Year's Eve celebration interrupted by a pandemic. A Canadian version released in 2013 of a Brazilian movie, "Antisocial" serves just as well as a dramatization of the end of this horrible year. A plague is made worse by social media and forces people to be antisocial by staying-in-place and refusing entry to their homes by those not already quarantining with them. I could be summarizing the past few months in real life as much as I can the movie with that sentence.
Largely panned by critics, "Antisocial" is admittedly not a good film, but it's became too relevant nowadays for me to dismiss it out of hand. Plus, once one gets past the obnoxious social-media introductions of characters and that every character before the last few minutes of the picture, at least, is entirely annoying, that the acting is suboptimal and the dialogue worse, etc., "Antisocial" is rather entertainingly trashy. I appreciate the consistency that has the requisite horror-film sex scene turned into the making of a sex video to be posted online. I also like the implied pun of a biological virus that is spread through computers and online. The ending is pretty good, too, adding some body horror and apparent zombies to the mix. I'm not sure that I would say this sort of cinematic exposure therapy makes me feel any better about the real-world catastrophe going into 2021, but "Antisocial" was more enjoyable than I thought it'd be, including than I thought it'd be at many points while watching it, for a picture that sums up 2020 too perfectly.
