Where David Cronenberg’s movies use their icky transformations and disintegrations as fodder for sneakily brilliant interrogations of sex (eXistenZ, Crash), disease (The Fly, Naked Lunch) and violence itself (Videodrome, A History of Violence), Brandon Cronenberg’s films work almost exclusively on a more visceral and sensory level. Sure, his sophomore film Possessor had intimations of vague critique regarding the insidious nature of bureaucracy and corporatism as well as unsettling suggestions about the malleability of identity, but it was the film’s moments of bone-cracking bloodshed that left the most marked impression, and his eerie, destabilizing way with mood. The younger Cronenberg’s third film, Infinity Pool, is for long stretches nothing more than an exhibition of some admittedly striking individual images. Particularly for its first half, the director struggles to get a momentum going or strike the sustained tone of uneasy mystery he’s clearly going for. The way the narrative progresses registers is oddly obligatory and dutiful for a story that centers on a person descending into degradation and slipping into a distorted headspace.
The protagonist in question is James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård), a frustrated novelist vacationing with his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman) at an island resort in a fictional location. As someone who hasn’t yet followed up his poorly received debut, which is going on six years old, James is flattered by and quick to befriend a couple he meets near the resort—Alban (Jalil Lespert) and particularly Gabi (Mia Goth), who professes to be a fan of Foster’s sole book. When a sun-dappled afternoon together off-site turns into vehicular homicide, James is made aware of the country’s policy for dealing with (wealthy) tourists who commit such crimes, which involves forking over cash for to be cloned and witness as your double is brutally offed by the living descendants of your victim. The procedure makes an indelible impression on the easily influenced writer.
Unfortunately, the ecosystem and accompanying set of rules Cronenberg sketches out here feel like a half-finished manuscript for a novella. The psychedelic dimensions of the premise should result in a film that progressing through gives the sensation of being engulfed by existential torment and Infinity Pool does make some progress on this front in its second half. But the movie never quite reaches the nexus point saturated by mental terror and demented beauty that you can feel Cronenberg, cinematographer Karim Hussain and editor James Vandewater straining to achieve.
The filmmakers try to render a prismatic nightmare, an extended, film-long bad trip, but the efforts don’t pack the punch they ought to. Hussain is fond of spinning the camera upside down as well as leering at the countryside of this fantasy island with menace (the film was shot in Croatia and Hungary). Perhaps to mimic the boundaries of James’s principles being shaken and tested, the perspective of the images often feels untethered from that of the characters and dislocated from a conventional way of seeing. Sometimes this is rather inexplicable and sometimes it’s used to ratchet up tension nicely, as with a disquieting shot whose angle is perched in the corner of a room, zooming in gradually on the group of people within.
Perhaps it’s the dead-eyed shell of a man that Skarsgård specializes in that throws things off (he was certainly an impenetrable, tenuous center for the otherwise largely thrilling The Northman last year). But then again, his casting is rather spot-on as an insecure vessel looking for something, anything to give him meaning and purpose, even if the source is rather unseemly. His chiseled, aging-but-still-perfect visage is a rather ideal candidate to be facsimiled and treated as replicable object. At one point, Em comments with distress about the depraved look in his eyes, and the actor can perform that sociopathic blankness all too well.
Unlike his father’s work, Brandon Cronenberg’s films operate more as rollouts of moments with the desired effect of “damn, that looks/sounds/feels really cool.” Over three films, Cronenberg fils has clearly demonstrated a predilection for haunting and haunted faces, from reliable creep Caleb Landry Jones’s placement in his debut Antiviral, to the expert deployment of Andrea Riseborough’s small-eyed, stricken features (and their relationship to her job as a body-inhabiting assassin) in Possessor. With Infinity Pool, Cronenberg has located a cast worthy of the obsession, full of too-wide grins and swollen, stretched parts that suggest cosmetic tinkering. There are also a collection of terrifying, terrific masks the central characters don that are a linked to an ostensible, ill-defined indigenous custom. Cronenberg utilizes them effectively enough but kind of dulls their effect when he wastes no time revealing them in one of the film’s first frames.
With the latter choices, and across Infinity Pool, Cronenberg betrays an unwillingness to weave the stimulating moments he drums up into a larger canvas, leaving pangs of devilish humor, broken sadness and half-hearted social commentary to languish. It’s never as cryptic and only intermittently as disturbing as we would like it to be. I could listen to Mia Goth belt out a mix of a bloodcurdling shriek and a whine all day, though.
Photo courtesy of NEON
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