Some six years after the publication of his debut novel, the well of inspiration has already run dry for James (Alexander Skarsgård).  He goes on vacation to La Tolqa with Em (Cleopatra Coleman), his wife from a wealthy family, to hopefully unlock the idea for his next book.  At the resort, they meet fans of James’ work, Gabi (Mia Goth), and her husband, Ketch (Adam Boncz), and the four of them make plans to leave the resort on a joyride on day to see more of the island.  A fatal accident during their illicit trip finds the four brought in by the police to experience firsthand the strange justice system of La Tolqa. 

Brandon Cronenberg writes and directs Infinity Pool for a Sundance debut and theatrical release from Neon.  Branded with an NC-17 rating, the R-cut was made more widely available, and while the 117-minute film contains its share of guts and gore, there is still the makings of a story underneath all the headline-inspiring sequences.  For the trepidatious, the flashy sequences do contain some upsetting imagery, but even with the artistic flourishes, it never feels gratuitous and thankfully never too broadly exploitative.  Unfortunately, for the horror heads in the audience, these sequences also feel a little hollow – style over substance – but thankfully James Vandewater’s editing of these tippy montages and Tim Hecker’s techno score maintain an unsettling tone throughout that can keep audiences on the hook long enough to finish this vacation from hell. 

The conceit of Infinity Pool is that when a tourist is charged with a crime, instead of being executed they can pay a hefty sum to be cloned and allow the clone to be executed in their place.  Cronenberg’s film is the latest entry into the sub-genre of class commentary which has seen accelerated relevance as the wealth gap continues to expand – Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, and elements of Glass Onion all from 2022 alone – though its brutalist take also means it is far less surgical, pointed, and nuanced than its contemporaries.  It is a shame because the message is well thought out and interestingly presented, but it gets bogged down by the bloody stylization.  The idea of cloning to evade true punishment drives home the idea that monetary fines are truly only a deterrent for people who do not have a limit on their means, and in this case, it allows for the affluent tourists to run rampant across the impoverished island nation.  Infinity Pool is, in this way, a horror-leaning companion piece to Marco Bechis’ Birdwatchers (2008) which explores similar concepts through a more dramatic lens. At their core, both films examine the negative effects of capitalist industry on indigenous people; Bechis through farming which takes up ancestral land, and Cronenberg pointing the finger at tourism which funnels money away from the communities that find their homes turned into playgrounds for the elite. 

Skarsgård is the sun around which the story revolves, but his puppy dog-eyed James spends much of the narrative getting pushed around into these bizarre situations, never quite standing up for himself though thankfully not solely a passive observer.  A fraught relationship with his wife brings about some immediate tension, amplified after his first round of cloning when Em wants to pack up and leave, but James has misplaced his passport and will have to stay behind.  With Em out of the picture, James is free to play as he spends more of his time with Gabi and Ketch and less time looking for his passport; after all, soon the rainy season will arrive and the resort will close, it is better to enjoy paradise while he can.  Unfortunately, James is a very unbalanced character on the page, possibly due to his submissive behavior which the other guests are quick to exploit and James’ desperate desire to disprove them, but the arc makes little sense across the length of the film as his motivations and thought process behind his actions change wildly from scene to scene.  As with the class commentary, it feels like Cronenberg is trying to tease out some ideas – possibly of masculinity, but there is also the loose framework of an addiction narrative at play here – but he caves to his own carnal desires and instead of introspection opts for maximalism through kaleidoscopic sequences of depravity. 

However, the true leader of the film is Goth’s Gabi, who plays the tourist with a simmering psychosis that is absolutely magnetic on screen.  Her performance grows in its insanity slowly over time from the delusional rich girl who is a bit star-struck over meeting James into someone who is so frantically out of her mind yet never crosses the line into realms of camp which Infinity Pool is careful to reject.  Goth has become somewhat of a modern scream queen through her continuing work with Ti West, and now delivering another performance accented by iconic moments in Infinity Pool, but it is notable that she still brings a unique timbre to each role so it does not feel stale.  In this film, she ratchets her performance up into terrifying levels of lunacy but does so in such a measured way that nothing feels out of place in her deranged growth.  As with much else in the film, her character has obscure motivations that are hard to track because, at her core, she is bored.  In a way, Gabi is the spiritual granddaughter of Kathy Bates‘ Annie Wilkes character in Misery (1990), but the similarities largely end when Gabi is revealed not to even care about James or his work. Cronenberg is content to do little in the way of explaining why this is happening, throwing its hands up in a way to maybe say that violence is senseless, but in a film as curated and manicured as Infinity Pool is, surely everything must be happening for a reason.  The why of a horror film is always a difficult task and can be the undoing of many great concepts, but it cannot be totally ignored as it is here, especially when so much thought and detail was given to so many other aspects of the piece. 

The further irony here is that it states James’ novel has nothing to say and uses too many words to say it, but by this point in the film it has become abundantly clear that it too is empty and yet will still drag on for another agonizing 20 minutes.  There is enough detail and care put into the film thus far that this clearly has to be a joke, a jab even at the audience still paying attention, but this kind of behavior is so insidious on behalf of Cronenberg and done in such a mean spirited way that its more distasteful than the try-hard imagery which is this film’s only true mark of relevance.  What is most frustrating though is that this film could have been so much more.  Observational humor works in comedies because after the punch line, the act moves on, but it does not work in satire because there needs to be a thesis made, and in the same way, it certainly does not work for horror. It is fine to use these observations as a starting point, but to go absolutely nowhere with these ideas is a failure of the script, and it is a failure here that Infinity Pool is unable to recover from no matter how much the actors try or how creatively disorienting Karim Hussain gets with his camera.  Everything is hollow and empty, and to rub just a little more salt in the wounds, Cronenberg ends his film on a nihilistic note, too afraid to ever truly cite his stance on whatever it is exactly he was trying to say here.