Review: Infinity Pool (2023)

Infinity Pool (2023)

Rated R for graphic violence, disturbing material, strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and some language

Score: 4 out of 5

The third film from Brandon Cronenberg, son of the famed body horror maestro David Cronenberg, Infinity Pool can perhaps best be thought of as a version of The White Lotus done as a horror movie. A satire of rich Westerners treating a resort in a poor, faraway country as their personal Grand Theft Auto playground and never having to face any real consequences, it is a dark and twisted tale whose weird sci-fi conceit is secondary to what it enables on the part of its main characters, all of it tied together by a pair of outstanding and frightening lead performances and the younger Cronenberg's trippy direction that makes an otherwise grounded-looking film feel like it takes place in another world -- just like the one its characters are visiting. It all ends on a grim, fucked-up note that indicates that nobody learned a damn thing, and that this twisted experience may have metaphorically consumed the protagonist's soul. It's not an easy watch, dripping as it is in decidedly non-titillating sex and violence, but it's still a hell of a watch.

Set in the poor, ambiguously Mediterranean/Eastern European-ish country of Li Tolqa, we start with two Americans on vacation at a secluded, walled-off resort, the novelist James Foster and his heiress wife Em. At the resort, James meets Gabi Bauer, an actress whose ego far outstrips her fame or talent who professes to be a fan of his first (and only) novel, and her husband Alban. The Fosters and the Bauers hit it off and decide to take a day trip into the countryside, where James accidentally runs over and kills a man while driving them home late at night. The next day, James is arrested for murder and gets his first taste of Li Tolqa's... unique justice system. Li Tolqa, you see, has technology (or is it something else? The rest of the world can't seem to replicate it...) that allows them to clone people, creating perfect copies that retain all the memories of the original. They have applied this technology to the death penalty, combining it with an old tradition of theirs where the surviving kin of somebody who died an unnatural death gets to personally execute whoever was responsible. For a hefty fee (no problem for a rich man like him), James has a clone made and executed in his stead while he watches, an experience that he finds strangely arousing. Shortly after, he finds that both Gabi and Alban have experienced this themselves, multiple times in fact, and that they are part of a community of Western tourists who come to Li Tolqa as a place where they can act out their wildest fantasies, knowing that the punishment is just a slap on the wrist if you have the money. With that, James' descent into decadence begins, all while Em grows increasingly horrified.

Alexander Skarsgård plays the everyman protagonist James, presented from the start as a bit of a loser who's struggling with writer's block, coasting on the success of one book he wrote six years ago, married into money, and treats the country he's staying in as beneath him. Gabi finds that he makes an easy recruit for her and her husband's clique of hedonistic vacationers, people whose money lets them think they can get away with anything. This film may put a sci-fi twist on the idea (if only because Brandon Cronenberg knows he has his father's legacy to live up to), but at its heart, it's fundamentally an "ugly American" story about rich foreign tourists acting like insensitive assholes in ways that would make any local xenophobic. Early on, there's a scene where a local manages to get an ATV inside the walls of the resort and use it to scare beachgoers, and later, we see a "Bollywood-inspired" musical performance at the resort featuring obviously white performers embarrassing themselves in laughable "Indian" costume. Even the color grading of the resort is devoid of the kind of brightness and vibrancy that's normally used in movies and TV as a shorthand for "exotic getaway", as though to suggest that, beneath the superficially fancy architecture and luxuries, this place and the people there are lifeless and hollow, a pale and unimpressive imitation of the kind of class that money can't buy. Li Tolqa itself, meanwhile, is made to feel vaguely alien, the made-up alphabet that all of the signs and writing are in (as though Cronenberg was telling the viewer "don't bother trying to guess what country this place is based on") being just the start, exactly the kind of place that tourists like James and Gabi would see as somewhere far from home where they can indulge their fantasies.

Nowhere is this film's disdainful portrait of the rich more evident than in Gabi Bauer, played by Mia Goth as a Eurotrash Harley Quinn with more expensive clothes and none of the things that make her likable past the surface. From the moment of our introduction to her, she is a conceited, egotistical asshole who talks up her acting career even though all she's ever really done is commercials (her specialty being playing the idiots who can't use a blanket or a butter knife), the implication being that, like James, she either came from money or married into it and her artistic accomplishments come less from her own talent than the patronage of others. She sexually assaults James behind the backs of both her husband Alban and his wife Em, and from there serves as the main force corrupting him into villainy. And by the end, as James finally reaches a line he will not cross, any sense of class or sophistication on Gabi is quickly hollowed out, her accent going from a posh (if stuck-up) pan-European one to a nails-on-chalkboard obnoxious screech as she mocks and insults James to his face over what a loser he really is. Goth makes Gabi a loathsome villain, attractive on the surface but ugly on the inside just like her husband and all her friends, and after seeing her in X and Pearl last year, I'm all but ready to appoint her a new scream queen in the making. (When your last name is literally Goth, it was kind of inevitable.)

And through it all, Cronenberg makes the film a treat to watch, juxtaposing the dour reality of Li Tolqa with bursts of trippiness when the main characters get into drug-fueled orgies, or when James is first subjected to the unique cloning procedure that serves as his get-out-of-jail-free card. A sequence that takes place from the point of view of the main characters' clones, thinking they're the "real" ones until they're lined up in the execution chamber and see the actual real ones in the bleachers cheering as they get their throats slit, threw me for a special loop and not only raised questions about who was "real" to begin with (which the film unfortunately didn't follow through on), but nicely set up a later twist concerning just how depraved the main characters really are. After all, people who pick on those they see as "beneath them" the way that these guys do are usually pretty vile and will pounce the moment they smell "weakness", as seen with how domestic violence is one of the best predictors of a spree killer, or how 19th century European attitudes towards Africa and Asia eventually came home when the Germans decided to make colonies out of their neighbors. Cronenberg does not go easy on either his protagonists or the society that shaped them, the final scenes implying that this will all happen again during next year's tourist season.

The Bottom Line

Infinity Pool is a whole lot of movie in a two-hour package, a film that will likely shock you if you're squeamish about sex and depravity but which will also take you to some spectacularly fucked-up depths. It's a weird movie that's not for everyone, but if you think you're up for it, give it a go.