Sea, sex and sun, sang Serge Gainsbourg. In Infinity Pool (Overflow), his third feature film, Canadian Brandon Cronenberg adds a few ingredients to the formula: violence, drugs and the death penalty. The result is a sci-fi thriller as captivating as it is sordid.
One-novel novelist James (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wife (Cleopatra Coleman), who happens to be his publisher’s wealthy daughter, sunbathe and dine at times Indian, sometimes Asian, in the paradise resort of a fictional Eastern European dictatorship (the exterior scenes were shot in Croatia).
James hasn’t published a book in six years, something a young fan remarks to him with a hint of reproach in her voice. A little sycophancy reinflates a bruised ego. This mysterious and enticing Gabi (Mia Goth), accompanied by her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert), will take an unexpected turn in this uneventful journey, supposed to revitalize and inspire the writer.
During a forbidden escapade of the two couples outside the barbed wire walls of the hotel complex, James rams and kills a peasant with an illegally borrowed car. He will be arrested for hit and run and forced by the local authorities to choose between living his own death, at the hands of his victim’s eldest son… or witnessing the execution of his double, the result of an ultra-fast cloning process. -secret. Provided, of course, to extend several tens of thousands of euros in bribes. As the English expression goes: The rich can get away with murder.
This unprecedented experience will have an immediate effect on James, both traumatized and invigorated by the spectacle of his own death. A trauma that Gabi, a particularly twisted seductress, will exploit in order to lure James into her web of sex, drugs, violence and horrors of all kinds. We’re not saying disturbing and terrifying Mia Goth is the new one scream queen for nothing.
The British actress is devilishly effective in the role of this perverse predator who does not let go of her prey. Alexander Skarsgård is just as convincing in the role of this artist – and his double – haggard, passive, overwhelmed by events, then intoxicated by his new role as an alpha male welcomed into a sect led by an irresistible guru.
These luxury vacations that turn into disaster evoke both the song Hotel Californiathe megahit of the Eagles, the series White Lotus and its disparities between working and bourgeois classes, the nightmarish visions of Lost Highway by David Lynch (Skarsgård reminiscent of Bill Pullman) and the mirror effect of Dead Ringers of Cronenberg Sr.
We find both in Infinity Pool of body horrorof goregrotesque masks of ancient rituals, blood aplenty, hallucinated orgies and explicit sex (even if a censored version is shown in theaters).
There are many elements to dissect in this film teeming with intensity from Brandon Cronenberg, in full possession of his faculties. He succeeds in creating a disturbing, suffocating, anxiety-provoking atmosphere, thanks to a production that is alternately nervous and atmospheric, of jerky images and psychedelic slow-motion. The haunting music adds to this impression of oppression and anguish.
Cronenberg’s screenplay is interested in death as a spectacle, in the need for thrills of people who feel estranged from their own lives, in the fight against the image we have of ourselves. Was it James or his double who was executed? Did he enjoy seeing these unbearable images? What is real and what is imaginary in this fantasized science fiction universe?
Brandon Cronenberg refrains from answering all the philosophical questions posed by his story, and we end up giving up trying to understand everything. Until the last image of the film, enigmatic, which offers a whole new interpretation to what we have just seen.
Infinity Pool is presented in theaters in the original English version and in the French version.
Thriller
Infinity Pool (V.F.: Overflow)
Brandon Cronenberg
Starring Alexander Skarsgard, Mia Goth, Thomas Kretschmann
1:57 a.m.