It’s a fact that the films of Brandon Cronenberg steadily improve, meaning this, his third feature (following ANTIVIRAL in 2012 and POSSESSOR in 2020), is his best yet. It’s still not quite there, though.
In truth INFINITY POOL, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival (in an NC-17 version) and was commercially released (in R-rated form) a week later, makes for an excellent fit with 2022’s CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg’s father David. Both films take place in unspecified Mediterranean locales, have grandiose sci-fi tinged conceptions and plenty of repellant imagery, and labor under screenplays that fail to do those elements justice.
INFINITY POOL at least has a promising set up. It features James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård), an American novelist, and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) on vacation in a secluded resort community. They meet Gabi (Mia Goth), a fan of James’ writing, and her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert), who quickly become confidantes. They’re present one night when James hits a man with his car and, on Gabi’s advice, flees the scene. But as James quickly discovers, this place has its own very peculiar rules of conduct, entailing a form of Capital punishment that involves getting hauled before a tribunal and sentenced to death by one of the victim’s offspring. But one can have oneself cloned (for a fee, of course), with the clone undergoing the execution while its originator watches.
James agrees to the cloning, which involves immersing himself in goo and experiencing psychedelic visions, and views the subsequent execution. He finds himself oddly turned on by it, and pretends to have lost his passport so he won’t have to travel back to the United States. Thus Em heads home without James, who falls in with a group of depraved tourists whose ranks include Gabi and Alban. These rich freaks are annual visitors to the resort who deliberately commit crimes so they can see their clones get executed. After being tricked into abusing a clone of himself, James, his writing career having been put on permanent hold, tries to escape, but the group tracks him down and forces him to take part in a final act of ugliness.
In keeping with his lineage, Cronenberg packs the film with gratuitous gore and perversion. I’m not entirely sure why James submits to a breastfeeding session with Gabi following a climactic killing (breastfeeding, is seems, is an especially popular modern horror trope), but the scene fits the gist of the film, which revels in bodily secretion.
Visually, Cronenberg and cinematographer Karim Hussain tend to favor odd angles, placing the actors at the edges of the frame and leaving a lot of space above their heads. Such forced artiness works better in the opening scenes, marked by indefinable tension, than the later ones, which are taken up with an only semi-coherent narrative that fails to do the audacious conceptions justice. Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard (whose novel COCAINE NIGHTS has much in common with INFINITY POOL) would have done wonders with this material, but in Brandon Cronenberg’s hands it feels underbaked, with many possibilities left unexplored.
The pairing of Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth was a perverse one, as Skarsgård is a subtle performer and Goth a bombastic and undisciplined one. Naturally it’s she who makes the greater impression, meaning that perhaps we’ll be seeing a sequel that follows Gabi a la Goth’s star turn in 2022’s PEARL, a follow-up to the characters’ debut in same year’s X. We can only hope that sequel materializes, because as it is INFINITY POOL just isn’t very satisfying.
Vital Statistics
INFINITY POOL
Film Forge/Neon
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Producers: Rob Cotterill, Jonathan Halperyn, Karen Harnisch, Anita Juka, Daniel Kresmery, Christina Piovesan, Noah Segal
Screenplay: Brandon Cronenberg
Cinematography: Karim Hussain
Editing: James Vandewater
Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lespert, Ádám Boncz, Thomas Kretschmann, Amanda Brugel, Dunja Sepcic, Zijad Gracic, Amar Bukvic, Alan Katic, Katalin Lábán, Kamilla Fátyol, Lena Juka Stambuk, Kristóf Kovács, Romina Tonkovic, Jeff Ricketts, John Ralston, Caroline Boulton