I don’t think Brandon Cronenberg knows what an Infinity Pool is. They’re supposed to be awesome, expansive water hangs, giving you an incredible view of a skyline. NOT some waking nightmare designed to question your personal humanity. Alas, in movie form we are stuck with Cronenberg’s vision of an Infinity Pool, which is equally mesmerizing and horrifying to those who enter. Mesmerizing and horrifying you say? I think that’s the phrase movie producers say to get Mia Goth to sign onto their film.
Stuck in a writing rut, James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) goes on a vacation at a rich resort in an ultra corrupt culturally rich fictional country with his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman). Hoping to be inspired by the locale, James instead becomes enamored with Gabi (Mia Goth), a fan of his novel, and her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert). The 4 take a sojourn outside the rich complex, which leads to some, ugh, mesmerizing and terrifying consequences for James and Em.
I have a complicated relationship with artistic flourishes. The more detached the flourish feels from the story it’s telling the more likely I am to quickly lose interest in the movie and declare it high brow drivel. Brandon Cronenberg must feel the same. He uses a lot of wordless visual montages, but the placement of them fits perfectly with what’s going on with James and Em. Because of the thought put into it, Infinity Pool’s artistry elevates the movie into something bigger and more fascinating, cramming a bunch of ideas into its storytelling that keeps the audience on its toes for a long time.
But the movie runs into a common problem. I think at some point Brandon Cronenberg realized what the endpoint of Infinity Pool had to be. But to get there, the audience has to get tortured and beaten into submission, repeatedly. That ending takes the place of plot, art, and even a chunk of character development, despite Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgard’s best efforts. All the promise, danger, and excitement of the first half of the movie is swept away piece by piece. While bold from a storytelling perspective, it’s destructive to Infinity Pool’s entertainment proposition, undoing what the stellar first half does for the sake of Cronenberg’s specific ending. This entertainment/vision imbalance hurts the movie, but not enough to undo Brandon Cronenberg’s twisted study on the human condition.
Only the most morbid of folks would choose Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool over all the existing magical ones in the real world. Geez, Brandon, there’s so many scary things that can happen to a person already. Are you trying to tell us about what happened on your Singapore vacation while you were in their infinity pool? Also, does Ti West have to thank you for Mia Goth entering your Infinity Pool? That’s sounds dirty, sorry everyone.