JG Ballard meets Ben Wheatley in Brandon Cronenberg’s latest. Which is a bit of a surprise, since the two have already met: in 2015, in the latter’s dystopian satire High-Rise. There are (literal) shades of Nicolas Winding Refn, too, and a healthy smattering of body horror inherited from the old man, whose filmography Cronenberg Jr. raids to make an unlikely fusion of Videodrome and A History of Violence, two very opposing milestones in his father’s career.
Unexpectedly, so much mixing and matching has resulted in the younger director’s most original and ambitious film so far; seeming to ditch the intellectually intriguing but dramatically sterile precision of his debut film Antiviral, Cronenberg is now going all-in for the cinema of nightmares, with a film that gets under the skin and itches, invades the brain and plays havoc with the synapses.
The Wheatley connection is not as far-fetched as it sounds, since Britain’s Rook Films co-produced Cronenberg’s last film Possessor, a tightly plotted, ultraviolent body-swap hitman thriller that, for anyone else, might have been a gateway to a more commercial career. Luckily for us, Cronenberg is not chasing that dollar; telling a completely new story, Infinity Pool, nevertheless dips back into Possessor’s bank of rich and perverse ideas about autonomy and identity, laced with hair-raising sex and graphic violence.
Just as his father lucked out with Viggo Mortensen, Cronenberg may well have found his muse in Stellan Skarsgård, who plays James Foster, a handsome, creatively blocked novelist spending his holiday with his rich wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) at a luxury compound in the fictional state of Li Tolqa. Foster is recognized by fellow guest Gabi Bauer (Mia Goth) and her partner Alban, and the two couples double-date. Gabi is a British actress who prides herself on her talent for “failing naturally”, which brings in lucrative commercials for labor-saving consumer products, while Alban is the French editor of an architectural magazine. Both know the resort, and they suggest a picnic.
Foster’s misguided faith in his well-to-do new friends, however, is the catalyst for the moment that changes everything. Leaving the compound is in itself a no-no; Li Tolqa is a police state bedeviled by superstition, poverty and corruption, and guests are forbidden to explore. Nevertheless, they hire a car and take off for a BBQ, during which Foster has a bizarre sexual encounter with Gabi. On the way home, the car’s lights fail, and Foster, who has taken the wheel from an inebriated Alban, hits and kills a farmer on a dark back road.
This is where it gets interesting. Foster is found guilty of murder, and, according to the rules of Li Tolqa, murderers must be executed — not by the state but the victim’s next of kin, in this case the farmer’s young son. But there is a way out. To satisfy the custom, the state will — for a fee — create a doppelganger for Foster that will take his punishment on his behalf. So he pays up, and the process is a doozy, an orgy of oily liquids, flashing lights and heart-attack electro stings that produces a perfect lookalike. Foster and Em are then forced to attend the execution, a crude, sadistic affair that Foster watches in mute horror — or is it fascination?
At this point, the obvious question is: how do we know which is which? But Cronenberg is ahead of you there. Recovering from his “death”, Foster discovers that Gabi and Alban have also been through this too, and that they are part of a thrill-seeking group of decadent hedonists whose lives have been changed irrevocably by the doubling process. Foster joins the club and goes all in, inhaling psychedelic drugs and taking part in fleshy Burroughsian sex rituals more reminiscent of Lucio Fulci’s kinky Lizard in a Woman’s Skin than Kubrick’s somber Eyes Wide Shut. Throughout, Gabi taunts and goads him to go further, until the film ditches reality altogether in the film’s puzzling but still electrifying final third.
Foster’s degradation is fascinating to watch, and comparisons with Videodrome are unavoidable. In Infinity Pool, though, the once ambiguous new flesh is starting to take blurry shape, culminating in an eye-popping scene in which seemingly normal human organs suddenly develop shocking new functions. As in Possessor, these envelope-pushing scenes could easily go, and the film would probably survive on the strength of its ingenious conceit. But Cronenberg’s commitment to working with extremes is the bedrock of the film’s thesis; beneath the blood and body parts, there is the story of an artist who wiped himself out with just one mediocre novel and has been trying to feel alive ever since.
