Infinity Pool is as disturbing as it appears from everything we've seen leading up to its release. It is an unflinching yet extreme parable about how lack of accountability amongst the privileged leads to horrific behaviour which is visually stunning and viscerally upsetting. The younger Cronenberg is proving he is a visionary film maker in his own right and knows how to craft cinema in a way that gets under our skin and crawls all over. However the film suffers somewhat from a script that feels like it cuts corners to get to where it's going too quickly, focusing on cycling through its premise without building a real enough world to truly make us live in it. Yet this doesn't take away all the power from the film which manages to still shake its audience to the core.
The film's plot points often feel a bit absurd and there are times where I wish the film had spent time earning where it was going. Often we are asked simply to accept what it is giving us without giving us reason to feel it. But despite not quite pulling off believability what the film does well is how it implicates its audience in its story. Infinity Pool doesn't make it about someone else but puts us in the position of James Foster (or does it?) and leaves us panting with an ending that is appropriately unsatisfying and disconcerting. We aren't supposed to feel good, we aren't supposed to get resolution. In the final moments we are given something upsetting to sit with.
The real ace in the hole here is Goth who manages to be all things for this movie, terrifying and seductive. She is part of what makes it all work in the end by making us feel the whole range of emotions at her character, one that is miles away from her infamous Pearl performance. She is as committed as Cronenberg is to making us as uncomfortable as we can be. It's hard to imagine anyone else in this role.
So Infinity Pool is deeply haunting and terribly uncomfortable but not quite the masterpiece this film maker clearly has in him.
Infinity Pool
Starring: Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Jalil Lespert, Amanda Brugal
Writer/Director: Brandon Cronenberg
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