Sundance Review: Brandon Cronenberg’s ‘Infinity Pool’ Gets Under The Skin
23.01.2023 - 19:39
/ deadline.com
JG Ballard meets Ben Wheatley in Brandon Cronenberg’s latest. Which is a bit of a surprise, since the two have already met: in 2015, in the latter’s dystopian satire High-Rise. There are (literal) shades of Nicolas Winding Refn, too, and a healthy smattering of body horror inherited from the old man, whose filmography Cronenberg Jr. raids to make an unlikely fusion of Videodrome and A History of Violence, two very opposing milestones in his father’s career.
Unexpectedly, so much mixing and matching has resulted in the younger director’s most original and ambitious film so far; seeming to ditch the intellectually intriguing but dramatically sterile precision of his debut film Antiviral, Cronenberg is now going all-in for the cinema of nightmares, with a film that gets under the skin and itches, invades the brain and plays havoc with the synapses.
The Wheatley connection is not as far-fetched as it sounds, since Britain’s Rook Films co-produced Cronenberg’s last film Possessor, a tightly plotted, ultraviolent body-swap hitman thriller that, for anyone else, might have been a gateway to a more commercial career. Luckily for us, Cronenberg is not chasing that dollar; telling a completely new story, Infinity Pool, nevertheless dips back into Possessor’s bank of rich and perverse ideas about autonomy and identity, laced with hair-raising sex and graphic violence.
Just as his father lucked out with Viggo Mortensen, Cronenberg may well have found his muse in Stellan Skarsgård, who plays James Foster, a handsome, creatively blocked novelist spending his holiday with his rich wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) at a luxury compound in the fictional state of Li Tolqa. Foster is recognized by fellow guest Gabi Bauer (Mia Goth) and her