Fun in the sun? Not when your resort-based horror-thriller is written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg. Our review of the trippy, disturbing Infinity Pool:
Writer-director Brandon Cronenberg doesn’t exactly like his audiences to settle comfily into their cinema seats. Infinity Pool is what might happen if Franz Kafka somehow wrote The Great Gatsby and relocated it to a 21st century holiday resort – and this is all before the film disappears down a rabbit hole of sex, violence and tumescent appendages in its second half.
Like Antiviral and Possessor before it, Infinity Pool’s mix of sci-fi and body horror will draw inevitable comparisons with the work of Brandon Cronenberg’s father, David, but there’s a hallucinatory quality to the younger director’s films that’s as much in the vein of wayward filmmakers like Ken Russell, Gaspar Noe and Jonathan Glazer. Infinity Pool is a deeply weird, often flawed film, but there’s imagery and ideas in here that, once seen, are unlikely to be forgotten in a hurry.
Alexander Skarsgård plays James Foster, an emotionally detached American novelist who’s gone on holiday by mistake. With his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman) in tow, James hopes that a few days spent basking by a pool in a plush yet nondescript resort in Eastern Europe will help him cure a chronic case of writer’s block. A few woozy days in, James meets fellow holidaymaker Gabi (Mia Goth), a British actress who happens to be a fan of his novel; a drunken afternoon spent outside their resort then sends them on a collision course with the island’s nightmarish legal system.
As he did in 2020’s Possessor, Cronenberg displays a real talent for economical world-building here; his fictional country, which has its own alphabet, laws and arcane customs, is immersive and convincing, with the Brutalist architecture of Croatia and Hungary used to dystopian effect. The resort itself is also an engrossing mix of the surreal and the familiar, with its razor wire perimeter creating an alternate reality away from the poverty outside.
But what begins as a wry comment on the insulating, corrupting power of wealth then descends into a trippy quagmire, as James and his newfound friends go on masked, orgiastic rampages that look curiously akin to The Purge movies. The second half arguably lacks the suspense of the first, with some scenes of sex and bloodletting proving so jarringly outlandish that they threaten to break the tension that Cronenberg so carefully built up elsewhere.
Some committed performances from Skarsgård and Goth provide a bridge between the film’s two halves, though, with the pair gamely committing to all the outlandish, toe-curling things that Brandon Cronenberg can throw at them. In fact, the whole film feels like a test of limits, whether it’s those of its actors, the boundaries of good taste, or the audience’s stomachs. You have been warned.
Infinity Pool is currently available to stream on Netflix in the UK.
