‘Infinity Pool’ - Sundance
Brandon Cronenberg offers a playground for the privilege with an all-inclusive nightmare vacation full of leashes, bodily fluids, and rubber that satirizes colonial tourism and power dynamics.
Infinity Pool is the latest edition to the “rich people are weird” sub-genre that made a splash in 2022. James Foster was once a literary treasure but has been unable to reclaim the moment he once had. His wife, Em, takes him on a getaway to a white sand fictional island of Li Tolqa in hopes that his six-year writer’s block will come to an end. James receives a well-needed confidence boost after meeting young Gabi who loved his book and is one of his many readers wanting the following up. Her eyes sense there is more than the young British woman wants from the writer besides literature.
After hitting it off at a dinner between the couple and Gabi and her husband, they are invited to spend the day breaking the resort rules. Something begins to feel off to James as in the middle of the day drinking Gabi decides to help James rid of some bodily fluids before driving back to the resort. James now behind the wheel in the dark of night hits a local but is persuaded by Gabi to ignore his wrongdoing which leads to a run-in with the cops when he wakes up.
Within the introduction of the resort, the camera tilts itself upside down inviting the viewer to a parallel world with an off-balance moral compass. A place of disorientation where the one percent is safe within the walls of their ivory palace but on the outside something sinister awaits. The tilt furthers as James's world becomes hazy when he is detained and explained his consequence is a mandatory death penalty. Because James and Em have the funds equivalent to a small country’s GDP, they can buy their way out of this criminal punishment by going through a gooey, rubbery procedure of cloning themselves. The trauma of watching your clone being killed would make anyone want to get off the island ASAP and return home, but James fakes losing his passport to indulge in hedonistic acts with his fellow rich hotel guests.
A slew of NC-17 activities that are visually inexplainable occurs including kidnappings, invasions, drugs, orgies, and more as the cult steers away from any sense of morality they had left. Cronenberg’s shocking visuals and situations feel very natural to him as a filmmaker which makes his bold decisions work no matter how grotesque. To the eye, this movie is disturbing with neon collages (a Cronenberg staple) but there is an underlying comedy to it that makes it hilarious to watch at times because of how absurd this entire situation is. This is his style, he was born into it and then adapted it into his version separate from his famous father. He is an expert at being an agent of hallucinogenic chaos that immerses his audiences in a sensory experience unlike any other.
Alexander Skarsgard is a part of a special group of actors who are extremely hot but extremely weird, making a collaboration with Cronenberg absolute perfection. He seamlessly moves through the film switching between dominant and submissive personas but it is his scenes with the newly-minted scream queen, Mia Goth, that are the real fun. As soon as time goes on her literary fandom mask drops, revealing an exhilarating unhinged side that is truly beautiful and a vision. As he becomes copy after copy of himself, it poses the question of whether his true self is the one first introduced in the beginning of the film or the one at the end after giving into temptation and continuing to diminish his identity.
What starts as a beautiful luxury resort is traded for the pure bodily fluid filth activities of the rich. Once you experience the liberation of living life with no morals, you can never return to who you once were. While described as a horror film, the fear isn’t from what is occurring on screen but what might come next for our travelers as they continue to cross into uncharted territory. Cronenberg is the latest director to follow the trend of rich people on an island, but his take on the sub-genre feels more textured and obsessive with the excess of his subjects. He is not asking his viewers to judge the actions of the horrific guests and their harsh treatment of the locals but to get completely entranced by sensory overload.