Two years after Infinity Pool, Brandon Cronenberg’s next film, the space horror Dragon, has secured a valuable bit of funding.
Following his 2012 debut Antiviral, it took director Brandon Cronenberg almost eight years to secure the funding for his follow-up, the similarly uncompromising horror-thriller, Possessor (2020). The warm reception to his 2023 genre piece, Infinity Pool (pictured above), however, means that the Canadian filmmaker appears to have had an easier time finding a backer for his next film.
Called Dragon, it’s said to be a “trippy space horror” about the crew of a ship coming into contact with “ancient organic lifeforms.”
The film almost went into production in 2017, but then financing abruptly fell apart. “I thought I had a career after Antiviral, and I fell on my face immediately,” Cronenberg told Film Stories magazine in 2023. “I just could not get another film made.”
Dragon has recently taken one step closer to going into production again, however. As spotted by Punch Drunk Critics, Telefilm Canada announced on the 7th May that it has invested almost $26m in a dozen “big-budget feature films.” One of the films on the list is Dragon, listed as a sci-fi horror piece and a Canada/UK co-production.
It’s unclear just how big a budget Dragon will need, particularly given how effects-hungry films set on spacecraft tend to be. But it certainly sounds like good news for Cronenberg, given the funding challenges he’s faced in the past. (Cronenberg’s esteemed father, David, also received funding for his latest film The Shrouds through Telefilm Canada.)
Read more: Infinity Pool review | Alexander Skarsgård’s gone on holiday by mistake
Infinity Pool, about Alexander Skarsgård’s failing writer descending into a maelstrom of death and violence at a remote holiday resort, was partly Cronenberg’s attempt to channel his creative frustrations, he told us at the time of the film’s release. “Although James [Skarsgård’s character] isn’t a stand-in for me,” Cronenberg said, “I wrote the script during a particularly dark period, and so there’s a kind of self-mockery involved in looking at my own insecurities and desperation as a writer.”
Premiering at Sundance and garnering some of the best reviews of Cronenberg’s career, Infinity Pool's success meant that the filmmaker felt he was “getting a little bit of traction” in its wake. By the sounds of things, he’ll finally get to make Dragon next – a saga he’s said to have co-written with comic book author Dan Abnett.
Here’s the full synopsis, courtesy of MUBI:
Set in the near future, Dragon envisions a society radically changed as a result of discovering ancient organic lifeforms drifting through the cosmos, whose alien biochemistry has been processed to create a hugely profitable drug that acts as an “opiate of the masses.”
If you haven’t seen it yet, Infinity Pool is currently streaming on Netflix in the UK. It’s quite intense.
