Review: Infinity Pool (2023)

What is the value of transgression? Is the shock itself valuable or is the value of the shock in how it points you in the direction of something more meaningful, whether a moral critique or a new understanding of human behaviour? Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool forces the viewer to confront these questions as it’s one of the most transgressive films of recent years. It’s full of horrific violence, debased sexuality, and one of the most provocative narrative concepts you’ll find outside the films of the director’s father, David Cronenberg. But is there more to the film than its provocations? The answer is complicated.

Comparing Infinity Pool to Crimes of the Future makes the elder Cronenberg’s film seem rather stately—if all we’re doing is noting the ways that the two films shock the viewer out of normality. Infinity Pool is hyper violent, stylistically aggressive, and full of sexual and moral transgression. It is a film that intends to shock. Crimes of the Future is provocative, but its interests are more intellectual than visceral. And so we return to the original question: what is the value of transgression, especially in regards to a film like Infinity Pool, which stands out largely by virtue of the sheer degree of its transgressive behaviour on screen?

If you are familiar with the work of David Cronenberg and other body horror filmmakers, I won’t blame you for casting aside this film’s assaultive approach to science-fiction horror storytelling. However, I can’t dismiss the film for its familiarity. There is value to a movie that gives a shock to the system in a cinematic landscape that’s committed to never upsetting viewers. Simply put, most contemporary movies are scared to offend people, while Infinity Pool seeks to offend the viewer in order to deliver a critique of a decadent elite. If an ordinary MCU viewer watches Infinity Pool, its transgression could seem incendiary and wake that viewer up to the possibility that movies, especially horror movies, are meant to confront and provoke, not coddle.

Infinity Pool concerns a failed writer, Alexander Skarsgård’s James Foster, on vacation with his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), at a luxury resort in a fictional Mediterranean nation. Bored of the resort, James and Em agree to join another couple (Mia Goth’s Gabi and Jalil Lespert’s Alban) for a day at a nearby beach. This breaks the nation’s rules, which stipulate that visitors should not leave resort grounds. They get drunk and James, driving the car back to the resort, accidentally kills a farmer on the road. Punishment for manslaughter in this nation is death, but there’s a special rule for tourists: they can pay to have a clone of themselves made, who is then executed, while they are free to return home.

James agrees to this bizarre stipulation, watches his clone executed in brutal fashion by the son of the man he killed, and then returns to the resort haunted by what he’s seen. Haunted or, perhaps, entranced? More the latter, as James starts hanging out with Gabi and her crew, who have all had clones killed on their behalf in the past. The freedom of such an arrangement unleashes James’s deeper libertine impulses. With no consequences, James transgresses at will.

From then on out, Infinity Pool charts James’s moral degradation. Every night leads to new boundaries crossed: hallucinogens, group sex, violence, abuse. Drunken flights of fancy turn into late-night raids on the homes of government officials. Characters bribe guards and start to use clones for fun as sex slaves. Em leaves James for home, but he stays, addicted to the ecstasy of his newfound freedom. He has entered a world where money can buy anything, even diplomatic immunity and seeming immortality through cloning, so there’s no limit to his actions. But where will such freedom take him?

James’ transgressions are depicted in extreme, if somewhat familiar, ways. Drug scenes are shot as kaleidoscopic montages of flashing neon lights, superimposed bodies and faces, and subliminal images of sex and violence. Scenes of violence and abuse show bodies torn apart and gallons of blood flooding resort floors. The characters don’t self-censor in their actions, so Cronenberg follows suit and doesn’t censor the visual depiction of their actions. We see all the blood, all the sex, all the unsettling imagery of people laughing as their clones are murdered or pissing on poor victims during abusive group sex rituals.

Such an extreme approach is a convention of body horror. The intention here is to highlight the avarice and emptiness of the rich. As the film progresses, every relationship accentuates the negative: the colonial nature of the relationship with the locals, the classism of the economic relationship with the staff, the sadomasochistic sexual dominance within the group itself. Every act of pleasure reinforces the class hierarchy even further. Mia Goth’s Gabi is the film’s avatar of this approach to the rich. She’s rich, beautiful, sexual, dominating, terrifying, and all-encompassing. She’s alluring, but only so long as her desires align with James’s. Once they diverge, she’s terrifying and won’t take no for an answer.

Infinity Pool also asks: if you can buy anything, want for nothing, then what value is there in fulfilling your wants? Thus, every action becomes a whim, every pleasure less important, every violent act something to forget about because the consequences will never affect you. In Infinity Pool, cloning is simply a metaphor for moral degradation; each bad action you make creates a new version of you, who is less human than the last.

The film’s content and message are not entirely novel. We’ve seen the sex and the blood in body horror films, and we’ve seen tales of cloning and class domination, but we’ve never seen quite this mix of message and format. The extreme content helps the critique land with a force that other films don’t have, even if the critique is rather obvious.

Thus, for a viewer who isn’t jaded or inured to such extreme content, the transgressions of Infinity Pool should prove more fruitful than familiar. And even for viewers who are familiar with the canon of body horror, the film’s provocations are not empty, even if they don’t satisfy the rich intellectual and thematic musings of the best films in the subgenre. There are few films like Infinity Pool. It’s counterproductive to pretend otherwise.

6 out of 10

Infinity Pool (2023, Canada/Croatia/Hungary)

Written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg; starring Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lespert, Amanda Brugel, John Ralston, Jeffrey Ricketts, Caroline Boulton, Thomas Kretschmann.

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