Brandon Cronenberg doesn’t lack for audacity. As the son of a famous filmmaker, he has chosen not only to continue the family business but to make the same kinds of movies on which his father initially brokered his legend. Simplistically, both David and Brandon are into “body horror,” which David arguably invented before moving on to even trickier, more insular and anguished material. Less simplistically, both filmmakers are drawn to fables of how technology changes our relationship with our bodies, particularly our erotic yearnings. One of David’s best films is his fluid and wrenching adaptation of English novelist J.G. Ballard’s “Crash,” in which a specific strain of sexual hunger, intensified by human disconnection, swallows its characters up whole. Brandon mines very similar terrain in his new “Infinity Pool.”
Driving “Infinity Pool” is Ballard’s notion of privilege as divorcing humanity from itself. How connected to humanity are you if you’re being coddled in a lux resort located in a country on the brink of poverty? It’s easy to criticize the rich as a means of denying the middle-class’ own conformity, so let’s bring it closer to home: How connected am I to my fellow humans as I type this out on my comfy couch early in the morning, with Spotify on and coffee by my side? Ballard wasn’t an eat-the-rich writer, as he was after more nuanced game. He captured and communicated the pain of privileged alienation, rather than lambasting it smugly from the bleachers. I will never forget James Spader in “Crash” saying that he feels like a “potted plant.” A profound metaphor for feeling as if you are but part of the collection of crap that sits in your home.
“The high concept is promising: James learns that wealthy citizens can have a clone of themselves made to pay for their crimes publicly, to give an illusion of justice to the poor and clueless populace while the government maintains its relationship with moneyed tourists by letting them off scot free.”
One imagines that the protagonists of “Crash” and “Infinity Pool” could relate to one another, assuming they were able to wrest themselves out of their respective heads. Brandon’s film follows James (Alexander Skarsgård) as he travels with his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), to the aforementioned kind of resort: for rich people among a country that’s drowning in crime and poverty, as well as run by what appears to be a totalitarian regime.
Cronenberg is refreshingly blunt about this context, about the huge gulf that exists between citizen and visitor. James is essentially a kept man, a tourist among this wealth, a writer who wrote one book that didn’t sell, propped up by Em’s money, which comes from her publishing magnate father. They are gorgeous but he is nevertheless approaching middle age, and so the struggling artist bit isn’t cute anymore.
Cronenberg’s last film “Possessor” also felt like a reaction to his father’s filmography. Where David’s films have grown spare and refined, “Possessor” was brutal, ugly, ungainly, perverse, and massively powerful. It was garage punk to the chamber music of David’s work over the last few decades. For a while, “Infinity Pool” finds Brandon playing a subtler game, proving to be a master of the innuendo and subtext that drives a modern David Cronenberg film. Em is furnished with a few nasty rebuffs of James’ career, all the sharper for the way that Coleman seems to toss them off casually. The film’s compositions are elegant, rich in medium and master shots that drink in the wealth of the resort with plenty of beautiful yet chilling negative space.
It doesn’t take long to realize that we are watching a writer’s emasculation fantasy, with James attempting to vacation his writer’s block away in the company of people with true power. Wisely, Cronenberg never voices those sentiments directly, allowing a subterranean tension to develop between James’s aims and his reality, and between Em’s expectations and her dawning sense of her disappointment with their marriage. James falls in with another couple, actress Gabi (Mia Goth) and architect Alban (Jalil Lespert), partying hard with them until James kills a local person in a drunk driving incident. At this point, Cronenberg introduces his high concept and we’re off to the races, which is to say the hallucinatory ultraviolence of “Possessor.”
With its controlled unease and macabre symbols of self-loathing, such as a collection of tribal masks that resemble melting faces, the first half of “Infinity Pool” is superb. The high concept is promising: James learns that wealthy citizens can have a clone of themselves made to pay for their crimes publicly, to give an illusion of justice to the poor and clueless populace while the government maintains its relationship with moneyed tourists by letting them off scot free. As we watch rich people watch their clones be brutally executed, those masks become more resonant, suggesting the West’s eroticizing of cultures that resent it and the biblical comeuppance that await. Yet James and Gabi and her crew find a way to turn even this ritual into a debauched game, committing crimes intentionally so that they may watch clones of themselves die over and over. Killing ourselves to feel purified and ironically more in touch with ourselves than ever before—very Ballard.
It’s also very David Cronenberg, particularly the recent “Crimes of the Future,” which hinges on medical operations as a publicly consumed event, as an art form that reflects a need to combat our numbness in the wake of pollution and proliferating technology. The idea of David and Brandon discussing their respective scripts over breakfast is irresistible, with Brandon showing his master craftsman father an early cut of “Infinity Pool” later in the day. David leans heavier into alienation effects in “Crimes of the Future,” and I’ve been quite vocal about my feelings on the efficacy of said effects. By contrast, Brandon lures you into complicity—for a while, his movie is an involving erotic thriller with sci-fi horror trimmings. David holds a seminar on his themes, while Brandon actively dramatizes them. “Infinity Pool” is a real movie, made by a natural born filmmaker who is still burning with the need to flex and prove himself.
Like “Possessor,” “Infinity Pool” is designed to appear as if it’s disintegrating before your eyes, the traditional narrative tumbling away to reveal a vortex of chaos, with grotesque special effects physicalizing the bitterness that haunts the opening of the film unspoken. There are daring sequences here that explore ways in which James manages to get off on his feelings of resentment towards his subservience to Em. Gabi takes over for Em in James’ life, serving as a kind of dominatrix to confront his symbolic castration. A James clone is treated like a dog and beaten; James or a clone sucks at Gabi’s breasts like a baby does mommy, and Gabi continues to escalate the sexual humiliations. Heads are beaten in like gourds and faces are torn to pieces. I recently wrote that they don’t make ‘em like “Blue Velvet” anymore; well, Brandon Cronenberg has the cojones to explore similarly neurotic collisions of lust and fury. The cut of “Infinity Pool” that I watched was the version shown at Sundance, which was rated NC-17. In American theaters, an R-rated version will be playing, which omits a graphic sequence involving Em’s first sexual overture toward James, and a variety of subliminal images of orgies and mayhem.
It’s a shame that most audiences will not get to see Cronenberg’s preferred cut, and the censoring speaks more to the cumulative power of the movie than what is shown. I imagine that the R-rated version will still be unnerving, but of course I can’t speak to that until I’ve seen it. And, despite my reservations, I intend to see “Infinity Pool” again.
My reservations? At a certain juncture, I think Cronenberg’s lurid carnival cruise leaves the audience behind. True to its title, the film strands us in repetition, in a slipstream in which clones and humans are interchangeably killable and screw-able and nothing, no matter how sensational, matters. This is the film’s very point; no matter how extreme their behavior, these people are stuck with their own emptiness, and, for some of them, all this unmooring awfulness is just a vacation that’s easy to escape when the time is up. In the right hands, that’s Ballard terrain; in the wrong hands, we’re talking the glibber cynicism of Brett Easton Ellis’s novels or of Eli Roth’s “Hostel” films. At times, I think Cronenberg just wanted an excuse to repurpose his bladdery exploding head effects from “Possessor,” which is more unified in terms of style and narrative.
And yet I can’t dismiss “Infinity Pool,” which was admittedly my instinct after first seeing it. The film is singular, and it has at its core an aching, existential sadness that steers Cronenberg away from Ellis and Roth, even if he maybe doesn’t reach Ballard. The final image is a stunner: a man in a beautiful, dangerous land, at rest and lost.
