Fueled mostly by a cover story last month in New York magazine, there has been a recent debate about the current preponderance in the entertainment industry of so-called “nepo babies”—children of well-known people who are following in the footsteps of their famous parents and getting work thanks to their celebrated last names. Like most think pieces on the entertainment industry sparked by articles in New York—the magazine that published a hit piece on young Hollywood stars in the mid-1980s that coined the infamous term “The Brat Pack” (Younger readers, ask your parents)—the article was pretty dumb because while younger people hoping to break into the industry that their parents had such great success in will obviously have a leg up on the competition, the same could be said for any number of industries. More significantly, while the familiar name might get them in the door at first, they still have to prove that they have the goods if they want to form lasting careers. If that article had been written twenty-odd years ago, for example, Sofia Coppola might have been the cover girl but today, she is one of the most critically acclaimed filmmakers of her generation and I don’t think anyone would claim that people like John Huston, Jane Fonda and Nicolas Cage owed their considerable success solely to having won the genetic lottery.
Which brings us, in a more roundabout manner than usual, to the coincidental timing of the release of Infinity Pool, the third film from writer-director Brandon Cronenberg. I doubt that there was a single review of his previous efforts, Antiviral and Possessor, that did not mention that he was son of legendary director David Cronenberg and my guess is that the streak will continue with this one. In Cronenberg’s case, the comparisons are largely unavoidable since his films to date have revolved around combinations of heady sci-fi concepts, barbed social commentary and graphic boundary-pushing depictions of sex, violence and body horror of the sort that his father has been synonymous with for nearly a half-century. No doubt it was a certain curiosity factor that brought people in to his first two films to see if he was a chip off the old block or not but at this point in his career, Cronenberg needs to show that he has more to offer than his legacy if he wants to continue on as a viable filmmaking force. With Infinity Pool, he hasn’t quite managed to make a completely successful or satisfying film, even by grisly art-house freak out standards, but he has created something that, at its best moments, is intriguing enough to suggest that he has the potential for such a film in the near-future.
The film takes place in the fictional land of Li Tolqa, where there is a razor-wire-sharp divide between the violence and poverty of the country in general and the lavish trapping of the super-ritzy all-inclusive resort that generates huge amounts of revenue from its wealthy clientele who spend their days lolling by the pool or getting sanitized and supervised views of the land and the people just outside the heavily fortified gates. Among the current visitors are James (Alexander Skarsgard), a writer six years removed from the publication of his low-selling and critically assailed debut novel, and Em (Cleopatra Coleman), the publishing heiress (her dad’s company published his book) whose largesse is funding their lives while he struggles to come up with a follow-up. One day, he meets another married couple who are repeat visitors to the resort, commercial actress Gabi (Mia Goth) and architect Alban (Jalil Lespert) and finds himself falling under their wing, at least in part because of how Gabi not only recognizes him but seems to have actually read his book.
Old hands at the ways of Li Tolqa, Gabi and Alban convince James and Em to join them in a surreptitious excursion outside of the resort gates in a car that they borrow from a resort employee. The four spend a day on a lovely beach drinking and basking in the sun—at one point, Gabi shows her appreciation for James’ talents in a manner usually only found in the letters section of Penthouse—and once night falls, they head back with James behind the wheel. Along the way, there is an accident in which a local is killed and while James wants to contact the police, Gabi and Alban assure him that this is one place where you do not want to run afoul of the cops and they flee the scene. They aren’t kidding because the next day, James is arrested and learns that the penalty for practically any crime in the area is the same—execution. However, for those who can afford it, there is a workaround—for those who can afford it, there is always a workaround. In this case, it is an exceptionally odd one—for an exorbitant fee, the guilty party can have an exact clone, right down to the same memories, of themselves made and the double will be killed in their place. With seemingly no other choice, James hits the ATM, undergoes the cloning process and he and Em bear witness as the clone is gruesomely stabbed to death at the hands of the dead man’s young son.
You may think that I have given away the entire plot of Infinity Pool but believe me, what I have described it merely the jumping-off point. While Em is horrified by the sight of even an ersatz version of her husband being disemboweled before her eyes, James is oddly transfixed by the whole thing. At this point, he falls back in with Gabi and Alban, who not only know of the area’s legal loophole from first-hand experience but who are a part of a group of super-rich tourists who have not only undergone it themselves but who use it as a way of liberating themselves from conventional morality. Like many elite tourists, they basically do whatever they want whenever they want and if their hijinks have tragic results for others, they know that they can literally buy themselves out of trouble. At first, James has no problem with joining in on the depraved fun but as things get progressively weirder, he struggles with whether he has what it takes to fully participate with them and what might happen if he decides to break from the others and return to normalcy.
In recent months, there has been a string of projects based around the skewering of the excesses of generally loathsome elites set amid isolated and unimaginably posh surroundings, including the absurdly overpraised Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Glass Onion and both seasons of The White Lotus. Although obviously ickier in its content than those films (trust me, the orgy of vomit at the center of Triangle of Sadness is child’s play compared to what is on display here), Infinity Pool is definitely part of this current trend. This is great for writers looking to do think pieces on the anti-1% attitude underscoring the current cultural zeitgeist but it does mean that those who have already experienced those films and shows may find this particular variation on that theme to be somewhat less than revelatory. After all, if you have seen one dark comedy about rich people misbehaving in beautiful locations these days, you have pretty much seen them all and this film simply doesn’t bring much of anything new to the party, outside of the sheer grotesqueries on display, to set it apart from its predecessors.
This begs the question—would Infinity Pool have come across better if those other projects had come afterwards or never existed at all? I don’t think so because it is ultimately far too uneven to work on its own. As has been the case with his father, Cronenberg has a number of intriguing ideas and an undeniable flair for grotesque imagery. The difference is that David Cronenberg also has a distinct artistic sensibility—one that was pretty much fully formed by the time of his commercial feature debut, Shivers, and which has allowed him to create the numerous masterpieces to his credit and which has even allowed his less successful efforts to be more interesting than the top works of most other filmmakers. The younger Cronenberg still has not quite developed the kind of sensibility that would allow him to pull his admittedly outre ingredients together into some kind of satisfying whole, which eventually becomes frustrating after a while.
For example, there is one moment when James is meeting with the fellow survivors of Li Tolqa justice when one of them poses a question to him—since the clone not only looks the same as James but has the same memories and emotions as well, how certain in he that he is actually the clone and that the real James was actually executed? This is a fascinating and provocative idea that, in the right hands, could have be spun out into a fascinating narrative but almost as soon as it is brought up, it is tossed aside to get to the more visceral stuff. As for that, while Cronenberg certainly has a eye for alternately bizarre and brutal imagery, here encompassed by everything from the garish replications of local tribal masks available at the resort gift shop to the stabbing, shootings, slicings and drug-fueled orgies that make up most of the second half to an extended appreciation of Goth’s feral-Goth allure, none of it really sticks in the mind after it transpires, let alone lingers long enough in the memory to really get under the skin. This is a real shame because Cronenberg has, in Skarsgard and Goth, two performers who are clearly willing to go to the kind of lengths that most of their peers would not even dare to attempt but he never really gives them anything that would justify those efforts.
Because of the weirdness on display, Infinity Pool may well generate some degree of controversy among cineastes but this is the kind of film where the reviews that it inspires tend to be more thoughtful and nuanced (this one excepted, of course) than the movie itself. What could have been a genuinely inspired provocation instead comes across at times more like High Rise Summer Vacation as it fails to develop its initial ideas into something truly inspired while clearly hoping that viewers will be so thrown for a loop by the imagery that they won’t notice. However, even though this film is far from a success, it does once again suggest that Cronenberg has the eye and the ambition to become a strong filmmaker in his own right. However, for that to happen, he is going to have to work with material that has a certain discipline to it and true me, discipline is one of the very few things not on display here.