While a husband and wife are vacationing at a coastal resort in a fictional European country, a fatal car accident throws them into the country's strict punishment laws. These laws involve execution, money, and cloning, making a horror science-fiction story that is surreal and shocking. This film is Infinity Pool, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg. And if you think that name sounds familiar, you're right. Brandon Cronenberg's father is famous director David Cronenberg, and Brandon is continuing his father's penchant for body horror and psychological dread.
After his brilliant 2020 film Possessor, it's clear Brandon Cronenberg is good at creating unpredictable singular premises that push human nature to the edge of destruction. Infinity Pool initially received an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, so the director had to recut the film and resubmit it to receive the R rating it has. And with plenty of executions and terror, this one offers a very rated R experience.
This film has plenty of blood, but it also has tears, breast milk, and semen. So be aware this film goes there as a twisted, unnerving, psychedelic tale of hedonism. Continuing the trend from other recent films like Triangle of Sadness (2022), The Menu (2022), and Glass Onion (2022), Infinity Pool is an indictment of the super rich 1% and how their financial status allows them to frollick and pillage (with zero cosequences) to the detriment of working class locals. This division of upper class and working class is also smartly delineated in the popular HBO series The White Lotus (2021 - ).
Although the leading man of this film (Alexander Skarsgard, The Northman, 2022) is not totally part of the 1%, he's easily seduced by their raunchily casual lifestyle of murder, power, and sex. Alexander Skarsgard is terrific as an ordinary man who is first bored by the sequestered resort life, then frightened by its hidden world of priviledge, then excited by its possibilities.
I understand these indictments are not new. The ideas and themes of Infinity Pool have been shown before in other films, like The Ruling Class (1972), Vatel (2000), or Dirty Pretty Things (2002). But the way these ideas and themes are shown made this film disturbingly unique and alluring.
The beautiful cinematography, from the shooting locations on the beaches of Croatia, is enough to seduce any viewer. It manages to look both sunny and sinister. And actress Mia Goth (Pearl, 2022) is most memorable as a nefariously unbridled woman who gets everything she wants. The masks showing humanity's dark side haven't looked this gruesome, or this speculative, in a long time. When you have the money to get everything you've ever wanted from a very special place, why would you ever want to leave it?
