Infinity Pool

dir: Brandon Cronenberg

2023

Few people could start a career with a mission statement that reads something like “I will make my father’s movies look like children’s television”, but here we are.

The son of David Cronenberg, in at least the last two flicks of his that I’ve watched, is making films so visually and viscerally disturbing that the flicks of his horror auteur father now look quaint in comparison.

Infinity Pool is his latest outing / atrocity, and unlike his last flick Possessor, seems like it has more of a social commentary component. It deals, after all, with a bunch of rich fucks who think they can get away with anything.

But those aspects aside, which are pretty gruesome and galling, the real horrors visited upon our eyeballs are aimed at, really, someone who’s just a chancer, like one of us.

Chancers are great for fiction in general and movies specifically. I think chancers are great audience surrogates generally. They are not an overused trope in movies. It’s the rare chancer that’s not relatable. Chancers usually are trying to “get” something, whether they’re entitled to it or owed it or not. In a comedy, they don’t get it until the very end, if at all. In a drama or a tragedy, they might get it, but at the cost of everything, if not their lives.

The chancer here, being James (Alexander Skarsgård), is aspiring to something else, something he doesn’t recognise yet, but he’s really yearning for it, in the way that only rich people with no cost of living pressures can.

He and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are not having a great time on their holiday, in some fictional Mediterranean coastal country (it’s really Croatia). They are in some high security resort that tries to keep the locals well away from the tourists. They are absolutely not allowed to leave the compound.

Unless they really, really want to.

James wrote an ill-received book six years ago, and hasn’t even been able to replicate that meagre achievement. His wife is mega wealthy, because her dad is one of the world’s biggest publishers.

So, yeah, they’re not worried about inflation or Ticketmaster’s price gouging.

A woman at the resort, being Gabi (Mia Goth), recognises him and praises his novel, saying it’s one of her favourites.

Like, bro, isn’t that the biggest and reddest of red flags right there?

Gabi and her French husband Alban (Jalil Lespert) are high energy and fun in that way that only rich monsters can be. Gabi immediately is able to convince James to do things he didn’t want to do previously without even the bare minimum of arm twisting.

Case in point: his wife previously suggested they go to the local “Chinese” restaurant for dinner. He says he doesn’t want to. Gabi says they should join them for dinner at the same restaurant. James is like “we must have dinner at that “Chinese” restaurant” now.

Why do I keep putting “Chinese” in quotation marks? Well, because the staff at the resort, who are not Chinese, and, presumably locals (meaning Croatian extras), get dressed up in whatever ethnic dress they’re told to. Tonight it’s “Chinese”, tomorrow it will be “Indian” for a Bollywood dance celebration.

Eww. Gross. But not as gross as the masks the staff are first shown wearing, that will pop up more and more throughout the film. They are, it has to be said, some of the most hideously grotesque masks I’ve ever seen in any context or medium, anywhere. If at all possible, they’re even more awful than the stuff done to people in a film where a lot of horrible things happen to a lot of people.

As instigated by Gabi, the two couples go for a day trip to some beach. On the drive back James is driving a borrowed car whose headlights start cutting out just at the right moment for him to unintentionally kill some poor local guy.

But this country, this weird mythical country… It has a strange legal system. I mean, it’s not strange that it caters to the wealthy, because hey, that’s the purpose of a legal system. The degree to which it caters to them, though…

In the interests of pigeonholing, yes of course this is horror: This is a horror flick, lots of horrible things are displayed and done to people. But there is an element that, in a different kind of flick, with a different point and tone, would make this out and out science fiction.

The legal solution at the heart of this story is that this backwards country somehow has perfected a technique to not only make physical doubles of people, but to replicate the original person’s memories in the double. I’m deliberately not using the word “clone” for a reason.

So if a person commits a serious crime, and has means, a double is made and executed in their place. James of course agrees to this and has to watch as one of the sons of the man he killed stabs his double very graphically and gorily to death.

So much blood…oceans of blood. The double is cremated, and the “criminal” has to take their ashes as a memento. The second I saw that, not that this is a predictable flick, but I did think “I bet James is going to get a stack of urns before this flick is over.”

And I was not wrong. How would watching an exact copy of yourself being brutally executed affect you? I don’t really want to think about it too deeply, or at all, but one can imagine that it would have an impact.

In James it opens up an idea that, well, if you have money and want to do terrible things, well, it’s a small price to pay to start living a little.

Gabi and Alban, and a bunch of other literal and metaphorical fuckers at the resort, try to bring James into their circle of reprobates, in order to do more terrible things. Why? Well, like a lot of things rich people do, there is no “why not?” No-one, least of all James, can convince them not to do terrible things. They have legal immunity, and that means that they can act with impunity.

The question we’re asking ourselves is: how much of this is what James actually wants? Does he actually want to go down the rabbit hole of debauchery, or is he being forced down it at gunpoint, or is he being lead by his dick?

We know that staying behind for another week is not really because he can’t find his passport. And sending his wife away is just convenience. But for the longest time I think we realise that things are far worse than James realises they’re going to get, and that makes James seem a bit dumb.

Gabi seems to be the instigator of everything, but it doesn’t seem like she’s only in it for the sex, or the thrill of killing, or a combination thereof. She really seems like she’s trying to “help” James through some process of self-improvement which involves psychedelic drugs, orgiastic fucking and torture / murder, but that somehow this is all for his own good, in order to transcend his meek nature.

It’s, um, not a path I would recommend for anyone, rich or poor. Mia Goth is definitely having a moment in her career. I don’t really know what she was doing three years ago, but in the last two years she’s been in three of the freakiest and most gratuitous flicks made. Two of those were with Ti West (being X and the even freakier Pearl), but as Gabi here she is far nastier, even if she kills way less people.

Her desire for James, while understandable (I mean, look at him, he’s Alexander Skarsgård), is nothing compared to the cruelties she wants to inflict upon him. That’s why, even with the elaborate and complicated set up, this flick doesn’t entirely work for me as a cultural satire or a parody of the excesses of the ultra-wealthy like The White Lotus or *bleugh* Triangle of Sadness. They’re not inflicting these horrors on poor, unglamorous locals – they want to torment James, ultimately, who’s just a failed author and a trophy husband, and not, like them, someone who’s done anything that bad.

The moral vacuum that maybe shapes their actions doesn’t apply to him. While he may be fascinated by their letting go of social convention (that it’s bad to harm people for amusement, or to cheer on as the state executes your body double), he still clearly has a conscience, and isn’t giving in to sadistic impulses. He seems overwhelmed with guilt at everything that he’s involved in, and that he desperately looks for a way out where one may not exist.

The ending can be seen as something of a shoulder shrug, but I think it might have a bit more meaning that it seems, on first viewing. I admit I felt somewhat deflated by the end, but surely that was the intention after all the horrors we beheld, as did James?

I think it’s a strong film, but also one that requires a strong stomach. The horrific imagery, melded as it is with very trippy visual effects and the least sexy sex scenes ever recorded combine to make this a very nightmarish endeavour, a phrase I use very carefully. Sure there’s probably hints and homages to other horror flicks and horror masters (had to think of Argento in the first “execution” scene, hard not to think of Brandon’s dad in a fair few other scenes, including that initial “reach around” scene which was uncomfortably hilarious), but this is all his own vile work.

I definitely had nightmares for a couple of nights after watching this flick, least of all because of those fucking hideous masks that the evil rich people wear, and I guess that’s a testament to this director’s vision of wanting to mess up the psyches of the people who watch his flicks.

Congrats, Brandon, mission accomplished.

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“Maybe think of it as a gift. You said you were looking for inspiration. There's something to the experience, isn't there? You come out of it feeling, it's hard to explain, but I can see it in your eyes, if you know what I mean.” - Infinity Pool