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INFINITY POOL ★★★
(R) 118 minutes
“I went for a colonoscopy last month,” says a character in Infinity Pool. “And it was like looking at a painting by Jackson Polyp.” You’d think that writer-director Brandon Cronenberg would be sick of people bringing up his father David, the original gangster of body horror. But lines like that certainly don’t discourage the comparison.
Alexander Skarsgard plays a failed novelist whose life takes a dark turn while on holiday.Credit: Neon
The odd thing is that Infinity Pool is shot through with anxieties about originality, along with guilt over privilege. The pampered hero James (Alexander Skarsgard) is nominally a writer, but since the publication of his sole book he’s apparently done little but live off his younger wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman), the daughter of a wealthy publisher.
Even a stay at a ritzy resort in the imaginary Third World hellhole of Li Tolqa does nothing to break a six-year block. Still, transformation of a kind does occur after he and Em stray outside the heavily guarded compound, involve themselves in a hit-and-run and are apprehended by the local police.
For James, who was at the wheel, the sentence is death. But since Li Tolqa is located in the magic-realist region of Latin America, there’s another option. For a suitable fee, a double can be manufactured who shares your memories and will be executed in your stead.
Mia Goth plays femme fatale Gabi, who keep the audience guessing.
The trouble, as you may have already surmised, is that afterwards you can never be sure whether it was you who perished or the double. But for certain jaded members of the 1 per cent, even this uncertainty can be a kinky thrill, to the point where they’re prepared to go through the whole ritual over and over.
It’s a wacky but quite original premise, and Cronenberg has found some interesting actors to bring it to life, especially Mia Goth, showing that her recent turn as a bloodthirsty starlet in Ti West’s Pearl by no means exhausted her bag of tricks.
As scripted, her character Gabi is the femme fatale of the piece, leading James ever further into temptation. But everything about the performance is designed to keep us guessing: although Goth is British in real life, there’s no saying whether Gabi’s breathy semi-posh accent is real or assumed.
Cronenberg is more of a known quantity, however many shock close-ups of bodily fluids or body parts he throws into the mix along with other outre elements: psychedelic drugs, freaky sex, the ultimate writer’s nightmare of hearing a bad review read aloud. At nearly two hours, Infinity Pool might have been more effective if it were starker, simpler, more tightly focused on its central concept. In short, more like the work of Cronenberg snr – though I’ll admit that this particular criticism might not be that helpful.
Infinity Pool is in cinemas now.
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