I Just Saw

I just saw Brandon “Son of David” Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool and it was very silly. It was a work of fart, on loan from a fart museum. All of my analysis can’t improve on a perfect review that my friend gave in one sentence: “It was too long and now my eyes hurt.” None of it evoked a convincingly realised world, its characters are thinly sketched and muddled, and the plot makes less sense the more it rambles on. I’m glad I saw it, though, as it was an amusing spectacle and fun to discuss after the fact.

The plot is that James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are on holiday in a fictional third-world country in the stranglehold of a conservative dictatorship. The Fosters have gone to a tourist resort so that James can find inspiration for his second book.

Tourists are encouraged not to leave the resort, but fellow married couple Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert) convince the Fosters to try a trip to the beach. A hit-and-run ensues, and it’s then that James is introduced to how justice works here: crimes are punishable by death, but foreign tourists can pay to have a clone of themselves take their place…

Infinity Pool has the same issue as Cronenberg’s 2020 sci-fi horror film Possessor: it only has enough plot to fill out a short film, so instead of either just making a short or developing the themes to meet the demands of a feature, the writer/director starts repeating himself and drawing out scenes with shallow provocations and laboured symbology.

Infinity Pool is somehow both better and worse than Possessor in this respect. It’s a bit more substantial in its themes, but it’s also more juvenile and overdone. (It’s not enough for Cronenberg to have a woman draw a man to her breast in reference to the pieta, for example, she also has to take her breast out and have him feed from it.)

The film’s story is effectively over when you see rich people laugh and applaud at an execution. It’s a neat resolution of the setup and by that point what the film has to say has been said. But it then continues for more than an hour, reestablishing the themes over and over again while coming apart at the seams as any sort of nuanced or logical plot.

Far and away the best thing about the film is Mia Goth, who follows up her recent performance in the horror film Pearl with a similar portrait of a female psychopath. Utilising her natural British accent with its Received Pronunciation, she plays Gabi as a depraved little rich girl whose initial sweetness and ditziness mask a howling void of de Sadean lusts unleashed by social privilege.

Like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, she sounds like money. She’s the type of girl for whom shooting a man in the head and taking him to bed is much the same thing. Goth pitches her performance on the outer edges of psychosexual mania and is magnetic.

Hers is the only intriguing and layered character in the film, which is remarkable given that this role could so easily have been reduced to a sexist stereotype, the screeching psycho slut. She instead gives Gabi a frightening authenticity and a legitimate personality.

I’d be willing to crawl out on a limb and say that she’s one of a precious few actors who warrants comparison to Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), an agent of chaos and nihilism who’d laugh even at her death. Goth is a godsend to horror films right now, and I eagerly await her next job.

The other actors are fine, but like the film itself, their characters are more of a loose assemblage of ideas than anything substantial. The film comes to life now and again with scenes of violent action, but there’s too much flash and not enough sizzle.

The sexual elements of Infinity Pool, however, are what’s most embarrassing. Does it mean anything in 2023 to show ejaculating penises, bisexual orgies under strobe lighting, and nude middle-aged bodies when those images have little direct relevance to the plot?

Not that I’m complaining about seeing a nude Alexander Skarsgard on a leash, but it’s not the 1970s. If I want to consume erotic material I can do that for free, and have it be actually erotic rather than saturated in auteur stylings. To be fair, some of the material that I’ve described does have thematic relevance, but like everything else, it’s not developed much beyond provocation.

This is a film that wants to be transgressive in the manner of a ‘70s arthouse shocker. Even its basic plot and relationships belong to that time, with its depiction of a heterosexual marriage mirrored by another, of which the man and wife represent a dangerous freedom from bourgeois values. It has little to say and is top-heavy with a hollow style, however.

Brandon Cronenberg is making better films than his dad these days, to be fair. Infinity Pool has more energy and weight than David’s recent Crimes of the Future. I can’t help wondering how much of that is down to Mia Goth, though.