Pop culture has been absolutely swimming with class satires lately. From Best Picture nominee, Triangle of Sadness to the meme factory that is The White Lotus, audiences seem more than ready to eat the rich. Into that melee comes Infinity Pool, writer-director Brandon Cronenberg’s contribution to the genre.
It stars Alexander Skarsgård as James Foster, a writer who wrote one minor novel years ago and has been living off his rich wife Em’s (Cleopatra Coleman) generational wealth ever since. During their trip to the fictional island of La Tolqa, they meet Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert), another wealthy couple staying at their gated resort who seem all too ready to break the rules. When James kills a local farmer while on an illicit drive from a secluded beach, he’s convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Lucky for him, La Tolqa allows rich foreigners to pay to have a double made of themselves who can then be killed in their stead. After watching his double brutally executed, James—with encouragement from Gabi and her other rich tourist friends—becomes increasingly erratic as he realizes that for the wealthy, there’s no such thing as consequences.
While that metaphor is fairly obvious, it’s the way Cronenberg chooses to present it that distinguishes Infinity Pool from other recent films in the genre. That said, his gore-y, smutty approach can also feel a little cliché, almost tired in its commitment to shock the audience with its debauchery.
That debauchery starts early, when Gabi gives James a handjob during their fateful beach trip. The scene is bookended with shots of James’s…fluids…hitting the ground, the first with urine and the second with, well, you know. In between, we get an extreme close up of Gabi’s hand stroking James. It’s surprising certainly, but it also very clearly sets the film’s tone and the audience’s expectations. Goth’s Gabi feels like she’s pursuing James from the moment they meet and Cronenberg doesn’t leave the audience or James guessing. From there, Infinity Pool is almost evenly split with graphic sex and violence and the two are inevitably linked. The handjob is immediately followed by the farmer’s death. A raid and shootout at a local official’s home is accompanied by an orgy. In Gabi’s circle (and therefore the film’s world) sex and violence are both avenues to liberation. La Tolqa is a land without consequence and every new experience James has takes him further down the road to, as Gabi basically puts it, transforming into a truly strong man.
If Cronenberg were more interested in deconstructing masculinity, perhaps Infinity Pool would enter the ranks of the other great entries in the genre like Parasite. But he’s simply not. Instead, the film is so focused on drowning the audience in its characters’ hedonism that it loses the plot. However, while some of that certainly lies with Cronenberg’s choices, it’s also in part due to Skarsgård’s performance. James is supposed to be passive and in need of something to wake him up, a shrinking violet even. But it’s a bit hard to believe that James would be such a wallflower when he’s as tall and striking as Alexander Skarsgård. Certainly, Skarsgård tries to sell the character, hunching his shoulders and giving James a somewhat frightened facial expression at all times. But he and the character are simply too passive, reacting to the madness around James while never really seeming to relish in the hedonism that Gabi and her friends express so naturally. While some of James’s reactions are understandable, we never really understand why this extreme behavior appeals to him or how it’s changing him.
Admittedly, what makes Skarsgård’s performance feel so inert is that he’s up against Mia Goth’s dynamism. Goth has perhaps become the indie scream queen with X and Pearl last year and she’s equally captivating here. Sure, Gabi is obviously an agent of chaos driven by whatever metaphor Cronenberg thinks he’s exploring, but Goth plays her with such abandon that nothing Gabi does feels scripted. There’s a Nic Cage-y quality to Goth’s work here, an unhinged willingness to do whatever a filmmaker asks by taking every concept to its most extreme.
Still, even in a movie about extremes, Goth is about the only thing about it that doesn’t feel forced. Every element, from the production design, to the disorienting camera movements, to the overwrought score is trying so hard to unnerve the audience that the cumulative effect is ultimately numbing. Everything in Infinity Pool is so outrageous that it eventually becomes boring.
