Infinity Pool, review: an orgiastic, gore-soaked White Lotus trip
A hit-and-run accident on holiday, with pretty wild ramifications, is the moment Infinity Pool, the latest freak-out from Brandon Cronenberg, turns to science fiction. Before that, it’s about bored western tourists looking for ways to cut loose. This White-Lotus-ish theme stays, but the rules change – at least if minor novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård), drunk-driving a party of four outside the compound they’re not meant to leave, wants to avoid the death penalty.
The setting for this raunchy slice of provocation is the fictional poverty-stricken island of Li Tolqa, for which Croatia doubled on the shoot. The dividing line between haves and have nots is the fortified gate of the resort: James and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are tempted into playing hooky by another couple, the wickedly amoral Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert), who, it turns out, know the drill.
That drill is an expensive procedure to have yourself cloned in a tank of bloody goo. (With a Cronenberg calling the shots, this kind of thing is par for the course.) So it’s a clone of James – with the exact memories the ur-James carries – who becomes the scapegoat needed by the country’s barbaric legal system.
As the execution scene plays out, one Skarsgård is stabbed by a giant ritual knife wielded by a child, gushing gore and gasping out his last. But it’s the voyeuristic smile playing on the face of the other one that really has you worried.
Cronenberg has a conceit here to rock out with. With unlimited clones on offer, what’s going to stop James, or anyone with money in this place, getting away with murder for the sheer fun of it? Skarsgård seems to discover his naughty id in this part; there are psychedelic orgies, shot with an aloofly gliding, seen-it-all detachment. Goth, too, is a huge asset, speaking with her real, squeaky, posh-urchin voice, both a tease and a torturer you can’t trust for a nanosecond.
Infinity Pool certainly mounts its statement on soul death, but there’s a certain bleached misery to it that keeps the brakes on. The outrageous potential of the idea, on a story level, is naggingly unfulfilled. When the script suggests a threesome with one Goth and two Skarsgårds, that would make a tidy logical endpoint, especially if things got gruesome and we had no idea who was making it out alive.
It’s also odd that the film’s most notoriously explicit shot happens before we’re even in the clone zone – a case of premature ejaculation, I think. Compared with Cronenberg’s terrific Antiviral and nearly-as-good Possessor, the film’s hardly light on outré imagery – just wait for the tableau of adult breast-feeding. Conceptually, though, there’s a curious reluctance to double down.
Cert 18, 118 min. In cinemas on Friday
