Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is back in Utah covering the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and the premieres are already flowing. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they are published, and check out our full archives of past editions.
One wants to thank God every time that Brandon Cronenberg shows up in the Sundance line-up with another bizarro tale of body horror in a cyberpunky dystopia. His last film, 2020’s Possessor, was a swell rejoinder to the pummeling that the genre’s stylings took at the fists of the gaming-and-entertainment press when Cyberpunk 2020 suffered through its disastrous launch, but though his latest shares some things in common with its predecessor, Infinity Pool ultimately proves itself to be a very different sort of film. See, Cronenberg, like his father, has an acute and interesting sense of surrealistic humor – one only needs to look at the master’s output in the ‘90s to vaguely get what I’m hinting at – and though Infinity Pool has a fair amount of jump scares, strobe-light flickering transformation scenes, and a pervasive sense of dread, its core story and its infusion of comedy into the proceedings gives it a lively Bunuel-like sensibility. After all, when you have a story that documents what happens when a bunch of rich assholes on vacation who have accidentally stumbled into a diplomatic solution to the problem of how to have consequence-free sociopathic fun at the locals’ expense paired with a keen sense of style, how can you not think of something like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or one of its imitators?
This isn’t to say that Infinity Pool is totally divorced from its genre roots – my immediate thought upon discovering what exactly the film was about was that it wouldn’t have been out of place in one of Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions collections or in a volume of Philip K. Dick’s pre-exegesis short story volumes – but it is a very different sort of beast than the grimy viciousness of Possessor. I actually think that the State Department now recommends that you pack at least one of those volumes in your carry-on (or download to whatever fleshy version of the Kindle exists in your terrifying reality), or at least they should have to prevent what happens to James Foster (Alexander Skarsgaard), a failed novelist in a steadily failing marriage to his publisher’s daughter, when he and his wife head to a resort nested on the coast of Latoka.
It’s almost the rainy season, which is a period of transformation and festivity for the locals, and most, if not all of those gathered at the resort are there to take in the sights and sounds before the floodgates open from the heavens and washes everyone back indoors. One day, while watching a local xenophobic performance artist, mounted on a four-wheeler, do sand-spraying donuts to piss of the tourists on the beach, James meets Gabi (Mia Goth), who is, somehow, a fan of his writing and is also gorgeous. She invites him and his wife out for dinner and drinks with her husband, and the foursome hit it off well-enough. So well, in fact, that Gabi invites them on a little day-trip to the countryside in a borrowed car for some sausage (metaphorical and literal, in her case) and wine on a craggy beachfront.
It’s on the drunken ride home, with James behind the wheel, that the car’s lights give out and they ram into a man crossing the road, killing him instantly. Gabi tells them not to call the police – Latokan prisons are, in fact, horrible, given the nation’s poverty outside of the gated fences of the resort – and they flee the scene. The next morning, the police haul James and his wife off to the station, where the chief (Thomas Kretschmann) informs James that the penalty for his actions is death, specifically a brutal one at the knife-holding hand of the deceased’s preteen son. But because he’s fortunate enough to be a foreign national in a country that deeply depends on tourist revenue, he can pay to have a double killed in his place.
Now, before you start thinking of Civil War draft substitutions and whatnot, the Latokan chief means this literally: They will make a clone James, which will be identical in every way, even down to his memories, and offer him up as the tribute. James consents, using his wife’s deep pockets to pay for it, and, after a bizarre and hideous cloning process, he watches from the gallery as his exact copy is brutally executed in front of him. He’s even given the urn as a kind of souvenir. Needless to say, his wife is horrified by everything that’s happening, but Gabi shows up. At a small gathering of other folks of her station, she reveals to him that each of them has had a double executed by the state, and that they’ve made a tradition out of it. He’s been chosen by the group as their latest member, and gets sucked into their nihilistic cocktail of deadly games, hallucinogenic drugs, and plentiful amounts of group sex. And, somehow, things only get stranger from there.
Cronenberg’s envisioning of this world – a kind of Eastern European backwater that has unlocked the elusive secrets of replication but somehow can’t manage to elevate its populace out of poverty – is as fantastical as you might imagine and as bleakly rendered as you expect from the director’s last name. There’s always some discussion of how he had to do something to the film to avoid an NC-17, and I genuinely don’t know exactly what it would have been in this case. Perhaps it was a too-long close-up on some pubic hair or maybe a scene in which Skarsgard goes down on Goth (this is the MPAA we’re talking about here), because the plentiful amounts of gore and flesh in Infinity Pool are of the type that would horrify the censorious and get the gutter-dwelling freaks like myself out on opening night. But it’s the bleak comedy that proves to be the real attraction, with Cronenberg seizing upon the bureaucratic semi-fascism of the place as a potent source of awkward yuck and also in how he unleashes Goth’s full unhinged nature on the always-innocuous-feeling Skarsgard. They make for a particularly intoxicating pairing, especially in how the echoes of their work released within the last year – Skarsgard’s steely-eyed innocence and stupidity in The Northman and Goth’s barely-controlled ferocious energy in X or Pearl – reflect themselves in both James and Gabi.
But once the group’s designs for James are revealed in full, Infinity Pool‘s moral compass reveals itself, and Cronenberg holds a particular amount of agnosticism about methods behind their madness. The system is horribly fucked up and wrong, but the enigmatic reasoning for their exploitation of this moment is fascinating and worth exploring as deeply as Cronenberg does here. There’s a moment where he shrugs off the question that would have fully defined the true Hollywood take on such a tale and focuses, instead, on the bleakly Freudian nature of it all: The destruction of personality, the reversion – literalized or otherwise – to an animal state, and what exactly that means as a kind of horrific kind of therapy. But then again, isn’t that partially the purpose of vacation, at least in the sort of Eat, Pray, Love sense? One’s out there to live vicariously through their immersion in a foreign culture, stumbling with ugly curiosity through sacred sites and rituals, in order to achieve some manner of emotional and spiritual absolution.
In a way, Infinity Pool is the ultimate vacation movie in that it seeks to bust open the niceties one tells themselves when they travel and strip, as the Cronebergs are want to do, the subcutaneous fat away from the sinew and bone that gives us our smooth and pretty complexions. And, hey, a ticket to this is way cheaper than an entire trip and actually living through all this, and it achieves the same result, much like the cloning process and subsequent execution itself.