Formula: The White Lotus * Crimes of the Future
Rich people are the worst. Am I right?
In a nutshell, that is Infinity Pool. There are a bunch of trippy sci-fi flourishes and violence too, but the main point of Infinity Pool is that there's an ultra-elite class of people for whom the rules don't apply. It's a point that's made a lot these days in film and TV. It's not even a new point as much as a new target. A decade ago, after the Great Recession, it was banks and finance bros who got the focus. Now we've moved to the casual rich. Those who seem to be professionally rich. Personally, I'm hitting my saturation point on it. So, the question about Infinity Pool is if it offered enough variation on this idea to stave off my indifference.
It's hard to talk about Infinity Pool without spoiling it, so here's your warning. The film is advertised as the story about a couple, James (Alexander Skarsgard) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman), on vacation in a fancy resort in Europe. They meet another couple, Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert), and go on a day trip with them. On the way back to the resort, James hits and kills a pedestrian with his car. Since it's remote and night, they decide to flee the scene as though nothing happened. We're led to assume this will be a thriller about keeping this secret. Instead, the murder is discovered by morning and James is executed that day. Only, there's a twist. This fictional country has special technology and a deal with the US. They are able to - for a price - make a clone of James and execute that copy of him instead. Soon after, James learns that Gabi and Alban are members of a group of people who have been cloned and executed before. He starts hanging out with this group of people who are literally rich enough that laws and consequences don't apply to them. And even then, the twists aren't done, but I'll stop there.
In a lot of ways, Infinity Pool is an inversion on the Westworld idea. In that world, the rich can live lawlessly by abusing robots that come back every day. In this world, it's the rich who can die and come back every day. Weirdly, this also reminded me a lot of the Community episode where Pierce starts hanging out with a group of elderly trouble-making students. And of course, the way that they expect everyone in the world to work for them is reminiscent to The White Lotus. As I said, there's a lot of familiarity to this idea at its core.
What sets Infinity Pool apart is the cast and Brandon Cronenberg's warped vision. Cronenberg has a lot of his dad in his directorial style. The visuals and sounds of this movie are twisted. He's a fan of that upside down camera shot that's becoming popular for the "elevated horror" filmmakers. Cronenberg is great at extracting the casual inhumanity of his actors. Mia Goth - no surprise - is the stand out. While she's been around for a decade, in the last year, she's really established herself as the most intimidating petite women who sounds like the ghost of a gothic child. I get the sense that whatever a director asks her to do, she will do it and will go further just for the hell of it. Skarsgard is interesting too. He's in that Jude Law group of actors who you get the feeling wished they were less handsome. Skarsgard loves to be weird and pathetic. He's often betrayed by the fact that he also looks like a hunky Tarzan. He's found ways to use it to his advantage though. In Infinity Pool, it's the fact that beneath his looks and proximity to wealth he knows he offers nothing.
I do think I liked Infinity Pool. The more casual it got in its nihilism, the more I appreciated what it was doing. Cronenberg is good at making some of the weirdest parts of the movie feel almost mundane. It's set in a fantasy world hidden beneath the real world. As tired as I think the ending at the airport is (just a couple months ago, The White Lotus had the exact same thing), it is a necessary reset. Anyway, the performances alone made this interesting enough to watch.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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