An actual infinity pool is a fascinating object that facilitates an illusion for those who enter or look upon it — a physical and liminal space missing the edges with which such spaces are typically defined. The process by which a pool functions are tucked away from plain view, letting the worry of an ongoing system be tucked aside, out of view, and the absence of that anchor somehow facilitating luxury. It’s also the principle behind pretty much all resort-based holidays, and it’s certainly the hook of writer-director Brandon Cronenberg’s new film Infinity Pool, wherein a system of death and rebirth becomes the kind of horny secret one might find in a Bret Easton Ellis novel.
At this particular resort, in the coastal nation of Li Tolqa, with its draconian penal code and ancient customs of vengeance, there’s a way out of whatever modern-day chaos is bringing you down. And for James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård, almost in Jeff Daniels from Something Wild mode), his internal drama as a frustrated writer and insecure husband is about to collide with something he can’t initially understand. Because on Li Tolqa, it is very easy to get a death sentence.
But for “international visitors and diplomats,” they have another option, in which the condemned can be cloned, perfectly and at exorbitant expense, and then have this new self be executed. James and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman, who is 1990 La Camilla Henemark gorgeous and also the moral center of things) are utterly horrified. But horror is so often a welcome mat made of the blood of others, and before you know it, absolutes are being eroded. “Our country is not a playground for foreign children,” says the man Thresh (Thomas Kretschmann), the only authority figure we get to know in any capacity. But the second price tags get assigned to unspeakable crime, well then we’re back to an all-too-concrete system of selling indulgences. It’s a kind of hunting trip — an exotic safari that lets the wealthy distill and refine exactly what kind of asshole they are through the shedding of blood.
In the way Cronenberg's 2020 film Possessor took a sci-fi concept like telepathic assassins but only let us see how it impacted society as a corporate tool, here we’re let in on an incredible gift that the people of Li Tolqa (referred to as "melodramatic,” “conservative” and “primitive” by various and sundry tourists) have developed that has already been codified as a safety valve for the worst kind of people. Every aspect of Li Tolqan culture and ritual that we encounter is through the eyes of the exploiters. Infinity Pool is very much like The Lobster in its use of a big, genre-based foundation as a way to dig deep into traditional modes of human experience. It’s never explicitly addressed as to the How, but the Why of it percolates throughout. It’s an exciting journey that trusts the viewer to be observant as well as to do some emotional detective work, while also carrying some big Literary emotions. (I would love to see Mia Goth in a take on Hemingway’s Margot Macomber.) It also has a wicked ear for the way the rich have of telling each other about themselves with sharp wordplay and the snidest of rejoinders that stop just short of demonstrable malice; the glamour of cruelty is in full flower, but like kudzu, swarming and reinforcing itself.
Mia Goth in Infinity Pool
As for all the advance word sluicing about it on what remains of Film Twitter, it’s hard to use sensation as a guide by which to measure people’s engagement. Infinity Pool is a major work that does not weaponize its unusual qualities, rather using them as an invitation. It is socially, sexually and economically unsettling, it is deeply funny, and it honestly does a much more interesting job engaging with class gluttony and humanity’s more base tendencies than Triangle of Sadness did. Cronenberg speaks to the inchoate, blank-faced need at the heart of being adrift in the corporate world, and he finds something bloody and dirty therein. Given how often certain kinds of people feel the need to bleat about whatever social movements have them paralyzed with the fear of contemptuous irrelevancy, there are aspects of this film that would seem very threatening to that kind of mindset. To that I say, “Good.” Films with this much imagination and fearlessness shouldn’t be an easy ride. As it is, this is a film of extreme ideas and content (whether in its R-rated or unrated version) that has never forgotten the responsibility of being entertaining for viewers: It’s kinky, provocative, shock-adept and electrifying. Infinity Pool feels defiantly alive, taunting you with its hallucinatory mists and bejeweled boat drinks and protoshunting. It doesn’t feel quite like anything else, just occasional flashes here and there, but its emotional look book encompasses The Prestige, Irreversible, The Champagne Club, Star Treks OG (episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?") and TNG ("Justice"), Seconds and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. It also features a trippy orgy sequence that feels like a summit between Radley Metzger and Screaming Mad George.
A serious question: Is there pleasure without exploitation? Can there be? And more than that, what is the whole timeshare vacation setup if not a baroquely organized BDSM relationship?
A few words about the mysterious character Gabi Bauer, and how Mia Goth inhabits her: Gabi has money, and a taste for pleasure, and she has Schrödinger eyebrows that keep as many secrets as they tell. After seeing Goth build an incredible body of work where far too often she plays a free spirit bound by an unyielding system, there are not words for how glorious it is to see her let her freak flag fly with this character, iconic every step of the way with each horrifying or outlandish choice. The image of her sprawled across the hood of car, a bottle of wine in one hand, a handgun in the other, and digging deep into the bile and letting loose on the screen — it is pure movie magic. She has that perfect Cronenberg hair — think Deborah Kara Unger in Crash, or Jennifer Jason Leigh in eXistenZ, or Tuppence Middleton in Possessor — and it’s just one of the ways that she holds court in the film. One can only imagine her in a Freeway movie.
If Cronenberg were having a dialogue with any of his father’s films, it feels like Crash is the one to use as a prism, being the story of an ostensibly normal disaffected artist seduced into an underground cadre of weirdos and perverts who’ve found a new loophole to enlightenment. But there’s also some unrealized Videodrome freaky flesh pulsating around the edge of the frame. My artist friend Cody envisioned it as the younger Cronenberg being sentenced by some Canadian tribunal to “go work at the Body Horror Factory like your father,” but it really is magnificent the way that each Cronenberg’s approach to these themes differs: David’s artsy, outsider polycules and disaffected hippies on the run allow for new evolutions to drift into society from the outer, disenfranchised movements, whereas Brandon’s new innovations are all the result of corporate interests that have found a way to acquire these new forms as new pathways to capital. To put it another way, David’s an Imajica, Brandon’s a Strange Days. And with Infinity Pool, the younger Cronenberg has fixed an eye on the horrors of the modern global economy, taking it all in without blinking.
