Infinity Pool review: Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth go off the deep end
Brandon Cronenberg's brilliant, disturbing thriller is a violent takedown of wealth and privilege
Film Reviews Infinity pool
It’s a little perfect that Infinity Pool, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, makes its debut just as the topic of “nepo babies” (those given unfair professional advantage through family connections) is a feverishly trending topic. It’s not wholly unreasonable to question who gets the keys to our collective cultural ship, but in the case of David Cronenberg and his son, Brandon, it’s clear that not since Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach began penning piano tunes like his old man, Johann Sebastian, has there been a more exciting father-son dynasty in the arts.
For his third feature, Cronenberg the Younger doesn’t ape his father’s style so much as he expands upon it. With Infinity Pool, in comparison to Cronenberg the Elder’s good-but-not-great Crimes Of The Future, you could even say he’s perfecting it. In his previous films, Antiviral and Possessor, and more so with his latest, Brandon leans into whatever mysterious genetic mutation stirs his fascination with body horror, social paranoia, sexual deviance in a group setting, and the counter-intuitive allure of self-destruction. If you’ve watched David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash, probably the most extreme movie under his belt, then Brandon’s new one is for you.
Infinity Pool (named for elegantly designed swimming pools with a vanishing edge, often near an ocean, so from certain angles they give the illusion of going on forever) is set at a fancy-schmancy resort where emotionally distant married couple James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing. At first, this suggests the film will be a condemnation of the elite class and how they fail to realize how piddling their problems actually are, like Triangle Of Sadness. But Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner, one that’s literally awash in vomit and feces, is normal compared to what’s about to happen here.
James is a frustrated author. He married into wealth. He can’t get it together for a follow-up book and is delighted when he meets a fan at the resort. Gabi (Mia Goth) invites him out to dinner with her husband, Alban (Jalil Lespert), which he accepts, annoying Em because it’s the same place he just said he didn’t want to go.
At a cringey Chinese restaurant (not a lot of Chinese people among the waitstaff), they plan an excursion outside the fenced-in tourist section of whatever unnamed Instagram-ready paradise they’re in. The journey gets weird (and features a surprisingly frank and spirited sexual act in extreme close-up) and then bloody when James accidentally runs over an islander in their borrowed car. He wants to stay and find help, but the others know that the law in these parts is incredibly strict, so they flee.
The next day, James is interrogated and realizes that he must be executed for his crime. However, if he pays a fee, a “double” can be manufactured that can die in his place. Is this code for some luckless local who’ll dress in James’ clothing and face the penalty? No, it means a sentient human duplicate with an awareness of death will be created and then killed by the victim’s young son.
This is strange, certainly, but we’re just getting started. Much of Infinity Pool’s strength comes from how it dives completely into unexpected and unnerving territory. It truly cannonballs into the deep end when James joins a group of veterans versed in the local style of crime and punishment. An agreeable dose of Philip K. Dick (or Dead Ringers) is added when we’re led to question just which version of which character we’re seeing. Of course, we’re all on a journey in this crazy vacation called life, but to see it laid out so metaphorically (and in beautiful settings and fashionable interiors) makes Infinity Pool a winner.
The movie does not shy away from physical and emotional violence. There are a few moments where it may be necessary to shield your eyes from the gore on screen. But the unsettling aspects of the movie are what lingered. Everyone, even the most well-adjusted person, dances with self-destructive behavior. How else can we explain Wendy’s Baconator? This impulse has been well-explored in film and literature, but what Cronenberg has done here spins the centrifuge to such a degree that we’re left face-to-face with its most fundamental elements. And you may not like what you see.
(Infinity Pool will be released in theaters on January 27)
78 Comments
Back when I worked in the suburbs I would get the Baconator fairly regularly for lunch.Back to the movie: I didn’t care for Antiviral, and while Possessor was better it still wasn’t as good as the average Cronenberg movie I’d seen. I guess with David’s decline though (I admittedly haven’t seen either Crimes of the Future) it’s plausible for Brandon to supersede him.
I used to get Baconators all the time too. Eventually I developed gallstones without realizing it, and finally ended up in the hospital with severe pancreatitis and lots of permanent damage. True story.You may think you’re invincible when you’re 25 years old, or you may think that eating like shit isn’t nearly as bad as smoking/drinking/drugs, but don’t be a dumbass like me. Take care of your body, you’ve only got one.
Oh geez, reminds me of when my diet of cider, candy, and a truly shameful number of Big Macs saw me laid up with gout (!) not too far into the pandemic. I’ll never forget the look on the doctor’s face when I answered his questions about what I’d been eating.
Thank you The Living Tribunal.
That’s a real Bummonator.
“Back when I worked in the suburbs I would get the Baconator fairly regularly for lunch.”
– that’s so relatable.
I’ve been vegetarian for seven years now and I still think about Baconators sometimes.
I liked Crimes more than any Brandon film, but Brandon shows promise.
I have always hated David Cronenberg as a director (I don’t mind him as an actor), but I suppose I shouldn’t hold that against his offspring… I’ll give it a shot because of Mia Goth.
I’ll take Cronenberg over Lynch EVERY DAY.You didn’t bring him up. I just find Lynch kinda annoying.
Well… I’ll take David Lynch every day and twice on Sundays. One of my all-time favourite directors.
Why not both lol.
Because I’m a jerk who brought up the comparison.
LOL nah not a jerk. I like almost everything from Cronenberg, Lynch and Aronofsky, who I discovered when I rent Pi on VHS back in the day. Yes I am VHS old lol.
I’ve got a huge box full of doubtlessly warped tapes in a closet in my parents’ house. I feel you on the VHS old. I even have a couple of “special edition” VHS tapes with a second tape that has “extra features”. I’m hot and cold on Lynch and Aronofsky. I like to grouse about Lynch but he’s done some really good work. I just don’t like his antagonism to making sense. Cronenberg I have always found at least makes sense in his films. They might be weird but there’s always a story and a rationale for character actions. Aranofsky…. man. I’ll love something he does and then he follows it up with something I HATE. I’m a big fan of The Wrestler. I cannot *stand* “mother!”. Dig Pi, dislike Requiem for a Dream. (Requiem has a lot to recommend it but I think ultimately it’s misery porn and he leans so hard on visual trickery it becomes distracting from the narrative.) I’ll kind of accidentally always owe him for Black Swan. (I was an intern in the industry when the WB Black Swan intern suit happened and my sponsor studio ended up making their internships paid to avoid the blowback WB was facing.)
Oh god I remember the 2 tape special editions. I remember that was an early selling point when DVD came out they ALL had special features, then not so much lol. I really like Black Swan, but that is mainly because I have had a thing for Natalie Portman since the Professional, which I have to add I saw back when it came out and we are the same age so not some 40 year old thinking a 12 year old is hot LOL. And actually The Neon Demon has VERY heavy Black Swan vibes.
I have a similar relationship with Black Swan but with Mila Kunis. And yeah, I have similar feelings about my fandom since I crushed on her as Jackie Burkhart. I WAS ALSO A TEENAGER, GUYS! But honestly you’re not as much of a fucking creeper as Besson. Have you read the original screenplay? It is… fucking YIKES.I really dug The Neon Demon. But I like Refn generally. I may be one of the few people who legit loves Only God Forgives. I get why people hate it. I especially get why people whose only exposure to Refn was Drive hate it. They’re not *wrong*. They just got the wrong impression of his overall work. Which is often slow burn, sort of experimental pulp lunacy.
LOL yeah that’s the bad part of getting older anytime you mention you fell for (insert celebrity) when watching something as a young kid you have to always add you WATCHED it as a kid so you don’t come off creepy. It’s like I was joking with a co worker, like say I wanted to see a movie aimed at kids, if I was a female and went, with no children of my own, it’s fine, however if a GUY does the same thing, the cops are getting called LOL
“Sir, why are you here watching Wolfwalkers?”“BECAUSE ANIMATION IS FOR GROWNUPS TOO AND I WANT TO SUPPORT THE IRISH ARTS!”
LOL
It’s a natural comparison. Both directors are deeply interested in how the normalcy of society is a construction that fails to mesh with reality and separates us from our more natural impulses. I’d say the big difference is that Lynch deals with the more literal psychological impact of this dissonance, whereas Cronenberg chooses to represent the divide by having it literally mutilate the bodies of his characters.Weirdly, Cronenberg DID make History of Violence, which is just about the most David Lynch movie David Lynch never made. It’s all the stranger, since the graphic novel had quite a lot of gruesome mutilation (the protagonist eventually discovers his estranged brother has been captured by the mafia and kept alive as a blind, limbless victim suspended from hooks and continually flayed within inches of death) which Cronenberg excises in favor of a more cerebral conclusion (the brother has risen to the HEAD of the Mafia and the two have a fairly straightforward quickdraw showdown).
Lynch gets on my nerves mostly via taking pleasure in inscrutability. I really hate his famous quote “I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.” Yeah, David, that’s why we COME to art. We’re trying to build meanings for ourselves. I come at art from a communication theory POV and his attitude always strikes me as very apathetic to communication. He doesn’t really seem to care if anyone “gets” his movies and in fact seems a little antagonistic to the very idea. Whereas I have never found Cronenberg to be so willfully obtuse in his filmmaking, even at his oddest.
I think that’s because of the impression the directors are trying to elicit. Lynch wants us to feel confusion that reflects the disorder beneath the surface of polite society. Cronenberg wants us to feel disgust, but also a kind of camp whimsey. Like, even at his most unsettling, Cronenberg movies always seem firmly tongue in cheek. We KNOW that immersing yourself in cutting edge academic science while also wanting to be a regular tough guy on the streets while ALSO wanting to be a classy family man won’t really turn you into a Kafkaesque bug monster, so Cronenberg invites us to have a little chuckle while our stomachs turn.With that said, Lynch seems like a really chill dude outside filmmaking so I don’t think he’s approaching confusing us with BAD intentions.
That’s totally fair and much more a burr in MY saddle than anything he’s doing. I mean… I do think he’s deliberate in not wanting to give clarity to anything he’s ever f’ing done but I agree that it’s not “trolling”. In some ways I admire it as a form of integrity but I also think there’s nothing wrong with being asked to clarify something, whereas I think he sees that as being obtuse.
….The Straight Story notwithstanding…
it’s not Lynch job – or any other artist – to hold your hand and be a guide…
No, but it IS their job to communicate. Whether that’s a story or an emotion or an idea or whatever. If you are willfully antagonistic to the communication process I don’t have much use for you as an artist. Because then you’re playing a stupid game of intellectual elitism.I’m not saying that Lynch does this. I AM saying that he doesn’t seem to give a shit if people understand him or not. Which is fine as far as a position goes but I don’t have to like it.Don’t mistake seeking shared meaning for “hand holding”.
It’s not that Lynch doesn’t “give a shit” if you understand him – it’s that for him, the art isn’t a puzzle with a single hidden solution that has to be decoded (which is how an awful lot of people seem to approach movies and art now). Of course he wants people to appreciate and respond to the work, but he encourages the audience to accept abstractions, and assign your own meaning to them. Which is not to say the work has no meaning for him, I believe that everything he puts into his work is intentional and deeply personal, but he is not imposing his own “explanations” on the audience and flattening the work to a single interpretation. Years ago I watched a movie by a fairly well-regarded director that I found interesting, with some oblique imagery that I found quite intriguing. I made the mistake of following it up by listening to the commentary track, and watching the little making-of featurette, in which the director explicitly explained in detail What It All Meant. And I was satisfied with his explanation, it made sense, I had answers to the questions. And I have barely thought about that movie since, and have little desire to revisit it. Meanwhile Lynch’s unexplained work has lived in my mind for decades, drawing me back to it, inviting my own participation and interpretation, making me develop my own solutions to the questions. It is – for me – tremendously more engaging that way. Obviously that’s not for everyone to find enjoyment in, but I understand Lynch’s resistance to easy explanation.
At the same time though, there are definitely lazy writer/directors who use ambiguity to disguise their inability to construct a good story. JJ Abrams comes to mind; why write WELL when you can write SURPRISINGLY?
I didn’t know it was based on a graphic novel.
Ayup. It’s okay. Not as good as Darwyn Cook’s Parker adaptations, but a solid little pulp doodad.
…neither did Cronenberg, he said. He said he wouldn’t have directed it if he had known.
Interesting.
This isn’t where I first read it (I can’t remember where), but:
Viggo-Works – Cronenberg on…
Was it a conscious decision of yours to not strictly follow the graphic novel?
“No, it never came to that because it was a very odd circumstance that, maybe Josh [Olson, screenwriter] has talked about it, but I never knew there was a graphic novel involved so it wasn’t as though I approached this [as an adaptation]. It’s not like when I made Naked Lunch where it was, in a way, an homage to William Burroughs and his work.
In this case I didn’t know that there was a graphic novel so I had no attachment to it. No investment in it. And, really, my investment was in Josh’s script. We had developed it to a certain point that it was going in a very interesting direction and we were both very comfortable with it, and that’s when I heard that there was a graphic novel. And I said, ‘Well, what graphic novel? And they said, ‘Oh you didn’t know?’
So then I looked at it and I saw that although the basic premise was obviously the same, it then took some turns and went in a very different direction from what we were doing. And with Josh, I guess it was conscience to go in a different direction. But for me it wasn’t. I was just following him and then developing it with him. So it had no effect on me, reading it.
I mean, really all it was was I was looking at it thinking, ‘Ok, maybe there’s something interesting in it that isn’t in the script that should be.’ But then I saw it was almost basically irrelevant to the script by that time. So there was no need to sort of make that choice.”
Hated? Come on now.
Crimes of the Future was incredible.
My friend was the set designer on Crimes of the Future. Does that make me cool? Maybe.
I say yes!
Agreed.
I once went looking for a way to see Infinity War again online and stumbled across another film called Infinity Chamber which was much better than I was expecting.That’s my story about films with the word Infinity in their title.
Take your star, dangit. Your story was better than review. Thank you.
This looks awesome. I want to see it. Best David Cronenberg movies:1) A History of Violence2) The Fly
Dead Zone.
He has a lot of awesome movies. Dead Zone included.
Eastern Promises.
Dead RingersShivers(Hey, I’m finally out of the grays!)
I don’t care about nepo babies or whatever, and I’m really glad that we’ll have Cronenberg content for the rest of our lives, but I dunno – so much of what I love about David Cronenberg’s stuff is the restraint, even at its nastiest. Brandon’s stuff seems a little too gratuitous sometimes.
I don’t either. Nepotism can get you the first couple of jobs or so but if you suck no one is going to continue paying you to suck up to dad or mom. Well, maybe a really short list of people may, but while Cronenberg’s a known name but it’s not a Spielberg or Cameron.
That’s only part of the conversation, though. I 100% agree that you do have to have *some* measure of ability. It’s the access to training, education, industry contacts, and ultimately the cushion to fall back on if things don’t work out that gets in some people’s craw. It’s all privilege.It’s also rampant in every industry. So I see that particular convo as interesting and relevant but not worth getting up in arms about. For anyone, including the targets of the conversation. Acknowledge the privilege and move on with your life. It’s the ones who need to deny it that are kind of annoying. And to be fair, I think the continued conversation is annoying too. It doesn’t need to be a Thing.
I’d argue that nepotism is probably easier to maintain in industries outside entertainment because a shitty actor is doing it right in the public eye, and will eventually stop being cast no matter who mom and dad are. In a corporate setting you can generally find a place to stash someone where they can’t do real damage. And wealth is a safety net whether there’s nepotism or not.I just don’t get why this is suddenly such a hot topic. It’s only been around since the beginning of civilization.
I think part of the “why now” has to do with an overall awareness of and activism towards inequality in the film industry. I’ve seen some argument that the nepo baby conversation has come about as a cynical attention grab from MeToo and I can see that as a possibility. It also was the subject of a couple of “traditional” entertainment journalism articles so I think that added a veneer of importance/relevance.But honestly it’s kind of silly for a host of reasons, not least because of what you point out. It has been around forever. But so have casting couches and we’re trying to be more aware and critical of that shit, too.
I was about to say the same thing. Do people think nepotism was invented in 2022 or something?
Right, it’s just pointless to dwell on. Humans are hardwired to act this way, it’ll never change, and whatever checks are put in place to discourage it, the rich will find a way around.
I think it is an expected arc for a son trying to follow his father in art to be a little more over-the-top, and then (hopefully) having later assumed the mantle, to learn restraint in his own time.
Uh…dont you know the debate is “raging” at the moment? On…Twitter!
I call bullshit on this article AVClub. You don’t get to dictate which nepo babies you fet, and which you don’t. Not with the level of sweeping generalizations that are your norm these days.
Are there mirrors in the phantom zone?
One.
ZOD HAS SPOKEN!
someone call neil patrick harris, he is supposed to go before zod.
fet?
…..fete.
I was assuming ‘fetishize’ and now I’m mildly disappointed
You know, your thought was better than mine. “Fetishize” it is!
Stop trying to make fet a thing!
Pee.
Nobody gives a shit.
Isn’t Mia Goth dating Shia LaBoof? LaBuff? LaBeef? Whatever happened to that motherfucker? WHERE’S LaBEEF?!
I haven’t seen his first film Antiviral, but I liked Possessor a lot, so this is a must-see for me. Oh, and Mia Goth in another messed-up movie? Hell yes. She’s really drawn to the weird stuff, isn’t she?
“She’s really drawn to the weird stuff, isn’t she?”I am 100% down with that lol she reminds me a bit of Samar Weaving insofar as her role choices.
I both admire and am annoyed by Goth’s involvement in scripting. I feel similarly about her as I do Edward Norton. Like… okay, you have some writing chops. But it feels so… I dunno, egotistical? The grumpy screenwriting professor in me wants to snark at them both “Stay in your lane, actors.” But that’s not fair at all. Especially because they both have talent. And hell, I love Owen Wilson’s screenwriting partnership with Wes Anderson.I suppose that’s my way of saying that yeah, she’s drawn to weird stuff but she also *writes* weird stuff. And is pretty good at it.
If it results in Pearl then it can’t be bad.
Not if you enjoyed Crash, not if you thought Crash was a good film, not even if you appreciated its subject matter or metaphor…. just:
“If you’ve watched David Cronenberg’s 1996 film Crash, probably the most extreme movie under his belt, then Brandon’s new one is for you.”Yeah, no.
I watched Crash, and Infinity Pool is definitely for me. QED.
Everyone, even the most well-adjusted person, dances with self-destructive behavior. How else can we explain Wendy’s Baconator? Next, are we going to be dissing on my love of the Carl’s Jr menu???
You have to go back to the 1700’s for a father-son duo in the arts? I guess they’ve had lasting appeal, but still.
Infinity Pool (named for elegantly designed swimming pools with a vanishing edge, often near an ocean, so from certain angles they give the illusion of going on forever)WOOOO yEAH! GET that word count
“It’s not wholly unreasonable to question who gets the keys to our collective cultural ship”“At a cringey Chinese restaurant (not a lot of Chinese people among the waitstaff)““This impulse has been well-explored in film and literature, but what Cronenberg has done here spins the centrifuge to such a degree that we’re left face-to-face with its most fundamental elements”Of course, we’re all on a journey in this crazy vacation called life, but to see it laid out so metaphorically (and in beautiful settings and fashionable interiors) makes Infinity Pool a winnerSome solid C+ English Comp work going on here.