Infin­i­ty Pool

To say he’s 6’4 with per­fect bone struc­ture and the physique of a Rodin stat­ue, Alexan­der Skars­gård plays a los­er excep­tion­al­ly well. We’ve seen glimpses of this tal­ent in The King­dom Exo­dus and The Diary of a Teenage Girl, but it’s more com­mon to see him typ­i­fy male peak per­for­mance than it is for a film­mak­er to utilise his uncan­ny abil­i­ty to sub­vert stereo­types and amp up the pathos.

Bran­don Cro­nen­berg is per­haps like his father in that regard, who has turned hand­some dev­ils includ­ing James Spad­er and Vig­go Mortensen into snarling strangelings. It’s dif­fi­cult to avoid com­par­ing Sr. and Jr. full-stop, giv­en that they both make full-tilt body hor­ror that plums the depths of human deprav­i­ty. Yet where David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future was a dark­ly com­ic look at ​‘surgery [as] the new sex’, Bran­don Cronenberg’s third fea­ture takes a more nihilis­tic line: death is the new life.

At an exclu­sive resort on the oth­er­wise impov­er­ished fic­tion­al island of La Torqa, nov­el­ist James Fos­ter (Skars­gård) search­es for inspi­ra­tion with his pub­lish­ing heiress wife Em (Cleopa­tra Cole­man). A meet­ing with actress Gabi (Mia Goth), who claims to be a fan of James’ work, leads to a trag­ic acci­dent involv­ing a local – but when all appears lost, the island pro­vides. James is offered a chance at redemp­tion via La Torqa’s high­ly exclu­sive – high­ly expen­sive – sci­en­tif­ic tourist programme.

This could be viewed as yet anoth­er recent film­mak­ing attempt to satirise the über rich (see Tri­an­gle of Sad­ness, The Menu) but Cro­nen­berg is less inter­est­ed in a gen­er­al ​“rich peo­ple bad” state­ment. We already know that. Richard Con­nell was mak­ing that point back in 1924 with The Most Dan­ger­ous Game. Instead, as with Cronenberg’s pre­vi­ous films, Antivi­ral and Pos­ses­sor, Infin­i­ty Pool is more of a thought exper­i­ment about the eco­nom­ic and psy­cho­log­i­cal val­ue we assign to the self. What do we have to lose when we no longer fear death? What is it about death that tru­ly scares us: the final­i­ty or the lack of control?

Although Cro­nen­berg could stand to push him­self to fur­ther extremes with his the­sis and flesh out the details of this dark world (some imagery, while strik­ing, feels redun­dant) he’s a refresh­ing­ly uncom­pro­mis­ing film­mak­er, carv­ing out a dis­tinc­tive aes­thet­ic across his body of work, and cast­ing actors who have a phys­i­cal­i­ty well-suit­ed to the genre.

In Pos­ses­sor it was sad-eyed Christo­pher Abbott and eerie Andrea Rise­bor­ough; here it’s an against-type Skars­gård and Mia Goth, who oscil­lates between sul­try siren and petu­lant princess of per­ver­sion. Infin­i­ty Pool is a visu­al­ly engross­ing slice of night­mare fuel that’s heav­ier on vibes than plot – an atmos­pher­ic, grub­by lit­tle down­er hol­i­day movie that takes on dark tourism and even dark­er desire with seduc­tive, sick­en­ing style.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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