Pay your way out of death in the trail­er for Bran­don Cronenberg’s Infin­i­ty Pool

With yesterday’s announce­ment of the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val pro­gram comes the annu­al scrum for atten­tion, as dozens of stu­dios and sales agents race to drum up buzz for their titles pri­or to everyone’s arrival in Park City. One such on-the-radar selec­tion is Infin­i­ty Pool, the new psy­cho-thriller from Bran­don Cro­nen­berg, which has already beat­en the rush by rolling out its first trail­er before the rest of the Sun­dance deluge.

The writer and direc­tor of the fiendish Pos­ses­sor has read­ied anoth­er work of skin-crawl­ing body hor­ror, specif­i­cal­ly root­ed in the exis­ten­tial ter­ror and tit­il­la­tion of find­ing one’s con­scious­ness inhab­it­ing an unfa­mil­iar form. And it arrives at a sur­pris­ing­ly on-trend moment, set at a pic­turesque resort mask­ing the moral grotes­querie of the wealthy, putting a dark­er spin on the same themes as Palme d’Or win­ner Tri­an­gle of Sad­ness or TV’s The White Lotus.

Alexan­der Skars­gård stars as James, a strug­gling writer come to bask in some ado­ra­tion with a vis­it to his fan club, led by the enig­mat­ic Gabi (Mia Goth, on a roll these days). He and wife Em (Cleopa­tra Cole­man) are enjoy­ing the resort and respect until one out-of-con­trol night results in an acci­den­tal death that James, due to some rather dra­con­ian legal codes, must pay for with his own life — unless, that is, he’s will­ing to spend the mon­ey to have him­self cloned and the dou­ble exe­cut­ed in his place.

As he takes this omi­nous deal, a seamy under­bel­ly of indul­gence and degen­er­a­cy is revealed beneath the placid sur­faces of the resort, as vio­lence and sex com­min­gle in fright­ful new forms of pri­vate enter­tain­ment. Cro­nen­berg has proven him­self a dis­tinc­tive enough film­mak­er that he should be free from con­stant com­par­isons to his father David, but it’s hard not to see the con­nec­tion to the recent Crimes of the Future, in which spec­ta­tors also gath­ered to take in fright­ful spec­ta­cles of flesh and blood.

The film has been slat­ed for a world pre­mière in Sundance’s Mid­night sec­tion, which will hope­ful­ly give way to a the­atri­cal run shock­ing some per­vert­ed life into the Amer­i­can spring movie cal­en­dar. (The Cana­di­an debut has already been set for 27 Jan­u­ary, though a UK dis­trib­u­tor has yet to pur­chase the rights.) But with inter­na­tion­al press flood­ing Utah for the first look soon enough, we’ll see what nasty tricks Cro­nen­berg has up his sleeve — though we’ll have to wait for the first round of inter­views to find out what mate­r­i­al had to be excised to get the film down from an NC-17 to an R.