Review: INFINITY POOL

James and Em fall in with a bad crowd among the holidaymakers at a luxury island resort and run over a local after one of their heavy drinking picnics. This is not any island resort, it might look like the Aegean version of the Maldives but it's run by a dictatorship with a brutal police force and a psycho justice system. James was at the wheel so he's up for the charge and, after a self damning session with the local detective he's also up for capital punishment. Well, there's a loophole. People in his position can have a surrogate, a clone, killed in their place and go their ways free as a vulture. James leans back on his wife's wealth and then watches on as a family member of the deceased knifes his clone to a savage death, and smiles faintly at the spectacle. One of the bad crew, Gaby, lures him from his marital bed to party with a group of others who have all watched themselves be killed in revenge. They're not just survivors, they're thrill hounds. Watching your own execution? Bet you can't eat just one.

This tale of purchased indulgence in the arena of the one percent brings wirter/director Brandon Cronenberg back to the persistent theme in his work of identity. Again, there is a mechanism of distance at work and this allows further and deeper examination than he's done before. Adding a sense of boundless entitlement to the stew he tells a story of limit breaking in a scene that allows capital crime without real consequence. The "executed" are presented with urns of the ashes of their clones as souvenirs. This is only a few steps on from the celebrity meat or assassination by proxy of his previous two films and, at a time when eat-the rich satires are forming their own subgenre of black comedy, is presented without knowing winks. Cronenberg is punching hard and all of them are landing.

The cloning prep, which owes more than a little to Matthew Barney's weirdness, lets rave culture imagery in and a later hallucinatory sequence among the death hedonists is ripped from pornography. The handjob in an early scene might be legitimated by some mild blurring but we get a money shot. Weapons as well as rarefied drugs are procured from the resort staff. Like the infinity pool of the title, one appears in passing in a scene and another is the basis of an anecdote about an early execution experience, there is no discernible limit from the swimmer's point of view but there are always limits and those who worry about them are liable to hit their heads square on.

Add a series of bizarre masks to the cloning and the thrill kill violence, the pretensions to personal worth blurring with morality rapidly redrafted on the fly are on frequently queasy display. Unlike something like The Menu or Triangle of Sadness, Infinity Pool asks you to consider the pleasures of this amorality as they are shown to go beyond sex and drugs and rock and roll to spectacles of physical self-annihilation without a single thought of any kind of cost. We're not being asked to jeer or boo the indulgent few, we're being invited to feel their skin. 

Amid all of this, we might find ourselves surprised to empathise with James, even as he surrenders to the rush of it. He's a failed novelist who married rich and his wife admits, when asked if she loves him, that she chose someone her Murdoch-like father would hate. So when we see James begin to struggle with this bizarre culture of normlessness, we see his failure to fully integrate and the punishing grind of resisting the temptations. Alexander Skarsgard brings all the appeal of his easy physicality and tempers it with the guilt of the hanger-on and the outrage that brings him so at odds with the gang. 

His counterpart is the increasingly dazzling Mia Goth as Gaby. Using her own expensively clipped wellborn London accent rather than the various American voices her roles have served her (e.g. Pearl) she presents a compelling force, unwritten potential and intimidating control. She is at the other end of the spectrum of Andrea Riseborough's conscience-struck assassin in Possessor and her final lines of dialogue take her into the person at the base of her lethal party girl persona such that we feel the same shock as one onlooker.

Brandon Cronenberg has been criticised for falling too close from his dad's tree. He's now made three sci-fis of deep speculative fiction involving David's tropes of body horror. Why doesn't he go his own way and make a rom com? Well, because he has found his own way. This is it.

Viewing notes: The cut I saw is, on investigation, the uncensored version with explicit sex and more graphic violence. While this can be visually very strong it is pretty much always very brief.  Brandon Cronenberg himself has commented (rightly, I think) that the cuts which lessen the effect do not change the film fundamentally. The screening I went to rates the film as R18+ which suggests that it will be strictly adhered to.