Infinity Pool is the third feature by writer and director Brandon Cronenberg, and comparisons to his extraordinary father, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, are inevitable. With Infinity Pool, Brandon explores dark, grotesque territory similar to what his dad’s work has charted, but only superficially. The younger Cronenberg has a long way to go as a director if this ugly, tedious film is any indication of his capabilities.
In the fictional country of La Tolqa, failed novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) vacations with his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) in a heavily guarded seaside resort. There they meet fellow guests Gaby (Mia Goth) and her husband, Alban (Jalil Lespert), and join them for a clandestine picnic in the dangerous countryside outside the resort’s gates. While driving home, Foster has a hit-and-run collision with a local farmer, and the next day finds himself facing the death penalty for it. But the corrupt officials offer an escape clause: For a sizable fee, a wealthy tourist like Foster can be cloned and an exact double will suffer his punishment. Foster agrees and witnesses his doppelgänger’s execution. He then discovers that Gaby, Alban, and others have not only been through the same process, but regularly commit heinous crimes knowing they can buy their way out. Instead of leaving the countryside, Foster stays and wallows in depravity with them.
The film’s first act sets the plot up intriguingly, but doesn’t deliver a genuinely imaginative storyline by exploring the concept of doubling the way a film like Invasion of the Body Snatchers does. A dark satire of a plutocracy where despicable Jeffrey Epstein-like degenerates indulge in vile decadence with impunity is barely fleshed-out, and Infinity Pool fails as both science fiction and horror. Instead, it’s predicated on the dullest kinds of shock value.
Repulsive subject matter and amoral characters can work, but it takes a gifted artist with rarified sensibilities such as Cronenberg’s father, or novelist J. G. Ballard, one of the elder Cronenberg’s favorite writers. Infinity Pool plays like a trashy retread of Ballard’s brilliant novels like High-Rise and Super-Cannes. Handling distasteful situations like this with wit and panache is hard to pull off, and the younger Cronenberg isn’t up to it. He has created a deadening, soulless film.
The cinematography in Infinity Pool has a few striking moments, but it’s mostly headache-inducing motion or downright pretentious with an overreliance on extreme closeups. There are hallucinatory sequences that are as hokey as the LSD freakouts in ’60s drug movies like The Trip and Psych-Out, only much less entertaining. It all plays like empty, flashy posturing by a film student.
The film’s cast is generally decent, but is saddled with an unengaging, unappealing script. Goth unfortunately gets plenty of screen time—a little of her vacant stare and shrill voice go a long way. The production design is inventive, especially in the eerily inhuman resort, and its wholly invented police state, and the dissonant soundtrack by Tim Hecker is also better than this movie deserves.
But there is nothing in Infinity Pool that hasn’t been done better—and less sickeningly— elsewhere. It isn’t even fun trash—it’s just overpoweringly, witlessly mean-spirited. The film delivers nihilism of the worst and most pretentious kind. This particular pool isn’t just stagnant—it’s shallow, to boot.
Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård star in Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool.
Infinity Pool
R, 117 minutes
Amazon Prime