“Infinity Pool,” the new horror film from director Brandon Cronenberg, now playing in theatres, takes place in the beach resort of your dreams… if you are prone to nightmares.
The action in “Infinity Pool” takes place against a sun-drenched all-inclusive beach resort in the fictional country of Li Tolqa. The exclusive, and very pricey, vacation spot offers a safe and secluded place for the wealthy to wine, dine and have fun. Imagine a kinkier “White Lotus.”
Just don’t go beyond the barbed wire gates.
That’s a lesson James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) learn too late. He’s a writer, looking for inspiration; she is his wife, an heiress to a publishing fortune. Their lives take a turn when they meet Gabi (Mia Goth) and Al (Jalil Lespert), an adventurous couple who convince them to leave the compound for a beachside BBQ. “It’s one day,” James says. “Let’s mix things up a bit.”
Some grilled sausage and a graphic sex scene later, it’s night. Time to pile into the car and return to the resort. On the way James accidentally hits and kills a local man. Distraught, he wants to call the police.
“No police,” says Gabi. “Do you know anything about the police in Li Tolqa? This isn’t a civilized country. It’s brutal and it is filthy. We’re not getting picked up for this.”
They skedaddle, but soon enough the law catches up with them, questioning Em and arresting James for murder. After a night in jail, he is sentenced. “Here, the punishment for any crime committed is death.”
But even though Li Tolqa is an eye for an eye kind of place, the rules are different for wealthy tourists. By law someone must atone for the crime, but instead of putting James to death, they offer to make a clone of him. The replica will have his memories and will believe it is being killed for James’s crimes.
It is agreed the son of the dead man will even the score by killing the clone. Justice and vengeance will have been served. But there is a caveat. James and Em must watch the execution. After that, they’re free to go, with the clone’s ashes in hand. “Consider it a souvenir.”
Trouble is, James doesn’t want to leave.
“Infinity Pool” is a deep dive into depravity. Sensuality, violence and horror merge, as death becomes a spectator sport, sex becomes hallucinogenic as James becomes seduced by the hedonism of Li Tolqa and his new friends.
Fittingly, there is an unhinged quality to the filmmaking. In a story where anything could happen, and often does, director Brandon Cronenberg ups the debauchery with slick filmmaking, gorgeous cinematography from Karim Hussain and the kind of nihilism not seen since the days of Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games.”
By design it is an unpleasant movie, a Grand-Guignol commentary on the privilege of wealth and the evil men do. Blood—and other bodily fluids—spurt, cruelty is celebrated and the moral compass is left spinning. It is, in its reflection of the foulness of society, also kind of a singular cinematic experience.
We will see better performances this year, but I doubt that we will see two more committed performances than the ones handed in by Skarsgård and Goth. As James, Skarsgård has few boundaries, pushing the character to disturbing places. Goth is the personification of bored debauchery; a person who treats heartlessness as recreation.
“Infinity Pool’s” mix of sadism and satire will not be for everyone. The gratuitous grotesqueries on display will put many viewers off, but adventurous moviegoers may find something new and compelling in Cronenberg’s nightmarish vision.
We have seen movies about assassins and we’ve seen movies about mind control but “Possessor,” the new film by Brandon Cronenberg (yes, he’s David’s son and seems to share some of his obsessions) now playing at select theatres and drive ins, mixes and matches the two in an unsettling, surreal hybrid of sci-fi and horror.
Anyone with trypanophobia—fear of needles—may want to cover their eyes during the film’s opening minutes as a young woman (Gabrielle Graham) impales herself with a long needle, right through the cranium. The needle is attached to a box with a dial. A twist of the dial and soon she is gruesomely stabbing a man in the neck, in public.
Turns out, it’s not really her brandishing the knife but a mercenary named Tasya (Andrea Riseborough), a mind control assassin who “possesses” people’s minds via brain-implant technology and forces them to do her bidding. Her handler, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), helps her find her way back to her own identity after sublimating herself in someone else’s brain.
Tasya’s latest gig involves parasitically getting into the mind of former cocaine dealer Colin (Christopher Abbott), a trainwreck of a man whose girlfriend Ava’s (Tuppence Middleton) father (Sean Bean) is John Parse, a high-powered executive. A rival wants Parse dead and Colin is the perfect patsy to do the deed.
From the film’s savage opening minutes through the sex and gore splattered landscape of the middle section to the climax “Possessor” is like a nightmare. Surreal visuals of Tasya and Colin as one hideous being or a severed hand unfurling its fingers are direct from night terrors, but Cronenberg takes pains to ensure that, unlike nightmares that are disconnected scenes that play in our heads, his psychodrama has depth and meaning. His highly developed visual sense—and a bloody colour palette that would make Dario Argento envious—is eye-catching and consistently interesting but it is the film’s ideas that linger like the unsettled feeling after you wake from a nightmare.
The movie’s exploration of how technology and humanity intersect is an increasingly timely question. “Possessor” takes that crossroads to a narrative extreme but Tasya and Colin’s technological melding is a terrifying vision of a future that feels like it might be right around the corner.
Cronenberg’s sophomore movie, after 2012’s “Antiviral,” is disturbing and ambitious with an icy, cerebral veneer that will linger in your mind for a long time afterward.
The idea of Brandon Cronenberg’s new movie sounds outlandish, but recent events suggest otherwise.
At the heart of Antiviral is the notion that in the near future fans will become so rabid they’ll actually pay to be infected by celebrity diseases to feel closer to their idols. Sounds strange, but consider the statue containing John Lennon’s DNA (courtesy of a Beatle molar bought at auction) by artist Kirsten Zuk or the $40,668 paid for a lock of Justin Bieber’s hair.
“I always thought it was kind of plausible,” he says. “A friend of mine, while I was shooting, pointed me in the direction of this YouTube video that was Sarah Michelle Gellar on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“At one point she says, ‘I don’t want to sing because I have a cold, I don’t want to get the audience sick,’ and everyone started applauding like crazy. I’m sure one person in that audience would want Sarah Michelle Gellar’s cold. It’s certainly meant to be satirical and a cultural caricature but I think it is not that far from what already exists.”
When I tell the son of famous director David Cronenberg about the Lennon DNA statue he says: “It’s very interesting to me how obsessed people are with the physical tokens, the fetishes. John Lennon’s teeth… It’s so incredibly religious. It’s like going into some church that claims to have the finger bone of some saint.”
The idea for the film didn’t come from an analytical look at celebrity culture, however. The concept occurred to him as he was laid low by the flu.
“I was obsessing over the physicality of illness and how I had this thing, physically in my body, in my cells,” he said, “that had come from someone else’s body and how there was a weird intimacy to that connection. After I got better I was trying to think of a character who might be able to see disease in that way and I was struck by the idea that a celebrity obsessed fan might want that kind of intimacy and it developed into an interesting metaphor.”
These days Cronenberg’s life is imitating his art to a degree as the film makes the festival rounds — it’s played at Cannes and Toronto—and the spotlight has been turned on him. “It’s sort of like being a character in my own film,” he says of the attention.
Brandon Cronenberg is a new filmmaker with a famous last name. While he may have taken the celebrated Cronenberg family fascination with body horror to a genetic level in “Antiviral,” he also proves himself to be an exciting new voice in dark cinema.
“Antiviral” is the story of Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones), a technician at Lucas Clinic, a lab that sells celebrity diseases to obsessed fans. For a price devotees of Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon) and others can become infected with actual cells from their idols. Herpes, skin flaps, the flu. You name it. Syd also supplies an underground market by smuggling copyrighted viruses out of the clinic in his own body. Soon, however, his bug bootlegging catches up with him when he ingests a deadly disease.
“Antiviral” works both as speculative fiction and satire.
Cronenberg creates a strange world that looks much like ours, but exists only in his imagination… for now. It’s a fame-obsessed world where celebrity operations are top news stories and people know the intimate details of their favorite star’s lives. It’s taken to extremes, but just to the other side of extreme. “Celebrities are not people,” the movie tells us, “they are mass hallucinations.” Tellingly we’re never told why the movie’s celebrities are famous, we’re just meant to accept that they are; that the hallucination of fame is enough. Rings true today. Just ask Kim Kardashian.
Satire blends with horror to create some of the film’s lasting images. There’s a butcher shop that literally feeds the public’s need to consume their favorite stars. The Sweeney Todd-esque butcher even has a celebrity cell garden where he grows “celebrity cell steaks.” Imagine a New and Improved Soylent Green with 50% More Celebrity! There are some grotesque images blended into these sequences, but the most horrifying is its plausibility; that this reflects our increasingly rabid celebrity culture, just tilted 180 degrees.
There is a cold, clinical feel to “Antiviral,” that recalls Cronenberg senior. It is, I guess, Brandon’s birthright, but it occasionally obscures the more humorous aspects of the story—celebrity ringworm for your dog, anyone?
“Antiviral” is strange speculative fiction, but it proves one thing—the apple doesn’t fall far form the tree, in either subject matter or filmmaking talent.
