Infinity Pool Review: Brandon Cronenberg’s Holiday Vacation Stays in the Shallow End

It’s tempting to compare Brandon Cronenberg’s films to those of his legendary father. After all, both filmmakers exhibit a preoccupation with humanity’s propensity for self-destruction, the interplay of pain and pleasure, and the exhilarating consanguinity between violence and the erotic. Infinity Pool, the latest and most outrageous provocation to date from the younger Cronenberg, is a lurid examination of a group of individuals who pursue physical and emotional ecstasy through sexuality, sadism, and the quasi-addictive utilization of a sci-fi contrivance—in this case, a foreign government’s practice of manufacturing human clones.

But where David Cronenberg’s films maintain a cold, clinical distance from their shocking subject matter, Infinity Pool sees Brandon Cronenberg embracing his characters’ bacchanalian revelry with tripped-out intensity, deploying strobing lights, camera spins, liquefying psychedelic effects, and ambient musician Tim Hecker’s claustrophobic score to disorient and overwhelm the viewer. If David Cronenberg seems almost indifferent to his audience, his son is so fixated on freaking people out that he can sometimes neglect to do much else.

The film opens by essentially speedrunning an all-too-familiar bad-vacation plotline in which a luxurious resort hotel in the fictional tropical nation of Li Tolqa plays backdrop to the marital malaise that’s seized a novelist, James (Alexander Skarsgård), and his publishing heiress wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman). In a scenario that will be well-trod territory for viewers of La Piscine, Force Majeure, Speak No Evil, and The White Lotus, a budding friendship with another married couple—commercial actress Gabi (Mia Goth) and architect Alban (Jalil Lespert)—leads to a disastrous chain of events that exposes James’s fundamental cowardliness and insecurity.

After a drunken picnic on the beach, James drives the four back to their hotel, hitting and killing a passerby with Alban’s car. Bowing to Gabi’s demands that the police not be summoned, the four speed away from the scene of the crime, but James soon finds himself in the draconian hands of Li Tolqan law enforcement, who inform him that, per local custom, the son of his victim shall be allowed to take his life and preserve the family’s honor. But, James is told, there’s a loophole for those rich enough to pay: For a price, the government will create an exact replica of James, uploaded with all of his memories, that can stand in for him during the slaying.

Thus, James becomes witness to his own slaying, an experience that he finds disturbing yet oddly invigorating. When Gabi informs him that she and Alban, too, have undergone the same process and felt similarly stimulated by it, she leads the suggestible writer into a netherworld of foreigners who get off on crime, drugs, partying, and a whole lot of fucking. From here, Infinity Pool descends into a hallucinatory morass of sex and violence whose boundary-pushing provocations can’t quite overcome the essential superficiality of the premise’s conception.

The heaviest influence on Infinity Pool turns out not to be Brandon Cronenberg’s own father but rather, for better and worse, the paterfamilias of 21st-century cinematic extremism, Gaspar Noé, whose anything-for-a-shock ethos is imprinted all over the film. Cronenberg’s trippy camerawork and prismatic, molly-addled color palette evokes Enter the Void, while the film’s semi-pornographic eroticism recalls Love. One particularly grueling moment of violence is even cribbed directly from Irréversible. But the film’s most indelible image, of James suckling at Gabi’s teat, is drawn from a more unlikely source: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Unfortunately, if Cronenberg’s titillating imagery evokes Noé’s work at its most enthralling, his ideas, storytelling ability, and sense of character recall the Argentine director’s films at their most vapid and philosophically bankrupt. The characters are all caricatures: James the cowed weakling; Em the distraught voice of reason; Gabi the queen-bitch femme fatale. And their hollowness is underlined in a scene late in the film in which Gabi humiliates James by letting loose a torrent of invective at him about his worthlessness as an author and a man.

However, that moment registers less as any sort of insight into either party’s character than just another part of Infinity Pool’s seemingly endless parade of wild but ultimately deadening excesses. The film is ostensibly an interrogation of identity, one that suggests that our fundamental sense of self may be more malleable than we imagine, but James is such a thinly drawn character from the start that his crisis of ego never resonates. There may be plenty of stunning things to ogle in Infinity Pool, but the film stays in the shallow end.