Infinity Pool: Triangle of Badness

(NOTE: this review contains spoilers. Go see the movie already!)

Consider the case of James Foster. A nobody, a writer, who one day spills coffee on a publishing heiress, falls in love, and finds himself on easy street: a published novelist with means and nothing left to prove. While vacationing in the beautiful-but-third-world-ish country Li Tolqa, James is approached by Gabi, an ultra-wealthy fan of his work, who invites him to take an illicit joyride outside their resort in a borrowed car. One very strange, drunken picnic later, James finds himself facing the death penalty for accidentally running over a local. Lucky for him, the country has a secret cloning program that allows James to purchase a surrogate of himself, at great expense, to be executed in his place.

Movies take years to make, so it’s fascinating that Brandon Cronenberg’s latest, Infinity Pool, arrives into a full-fledged zeitgeist of entertainments centered on elites behaving badly in exotic locales. The film opens with some fairly cheap shots that barely qualify as satire, jokes about omelet chefs. This is where the White Lotus fans get in.

But Infinity Pool is utterly disinterested in any aspect of the hotel’s staff or the downtrodden Li Tolqan peasants, who are there merely as a source of drugs, guns, gruesome deaths, and other plot-furthering elements. The Fosters, played by Alexander Skarsgård and Cleopatra Coleman, are nearly catatonic with ennui as they sleepwalk through the bland comfort bubble of the resort, which is surrounded by an ominous barbed-wire tipped fence (apparently inspired by an actual vacation experience Cronenberg took in the Dominican Republic). There are also obvious parallels to Ruben Östlund’s recent Palme D’Or winner Triangle of Sadness (2022), although the mayhem depicted in Infinity Pool makes the puke-and-shit soaked centerpiece of that film appear almost quaint.

Following James’ initial ordeal with the Li Tolqan legal system, Gabi inducts him into a small gang of ultra-privileged ghouls who call themselves “zombies,” living on after the execution of their surrogate clones. Mia Goth can now add Gabi to her impressive rampage of unhinged characters from Ti West’s diptych X and Pearl; she was something of an audience favorite at the screening I attended (more on that later).

The gang of zombies continue to abuse the country’s strange laws to commit crimes and watch their duplicated selves suffer the consequences. The cloning twist is introduced so casually that it comes off as just another weird thing about the place. James becomes intoxicated by his newly elevated station, where moral currency is expended as easily as the filthy lucre that he married into. His wife, Em, however, is appalled, and leaves him alone to descend further into this depraved new world.

Despite the surface parallels to White Lotus and Triangle of Sadness, the film actually shares numerous plot points and themes with Sundown (2021), Michel Franco’s bold and obscure study of a wealthy nihilist unraveling on vacation in Acapulco. Both films explore indolent male characters trapped in arrested development by unearned wealth who pretend to lose their passports to avoid leaving the limbo state of “vacation,” and who wind up alone in deck chairs contemplating their purgatorial existence.

In Infinity Pool, Cronenberg proves himself again a master world-builder. The fictional country of Li Tolqa is brought to life in quick bold strokes such as the vaguely fascistic sunwheel insignia the police sport on their olive drab uniforms. Working with longtime cinematographer Karim Hussain, Cronenberg crafts his signature visual world of off-kilter framing and psychedelic lighting, aided by a liquid-metal score from ambient noise musician Tim Hecker. Those who loved Possessor (like me) may in fact become a bit bored with these repeated stylistic devices—the trippy camera effects depicting psychological fragmentation, creepy masks, and weird body-horror sex seem less effective this time around. Shall we expect more of the same in the filmmaker’s next project, a miniseries adaptation of (gasp) a J.G. Ballard novel?

As James shambles through the third act, reckoning with the mess he’s made of his life, so too does the film appear unsure of what to do next. Even avid Cronenbergians may find their attention drifting—which, to be honest, avid Cronenbergians should expect from time to time.

But even as the film drifts, it morphs into a surprisingly poignant study of a man coming to terms with his failures. Hypnotized by his proximity to wealth, James is jolted awake when forced to confront, literally, himself. We find out his book got terrible reviews. The character of Gabi also changes into something of a screeching-banshee conscience; she breaks James down, hard, then builds him back up in a scene that had the mostly full theater audibly cringing.

Indeed, based on the audience reaction at the screening I attended, this movie will push people’s buttons. Even before the real crazy stuff got going, a regular patter of loud “What the fucks?” and similar exclamations emanated from the opening Friday night crowd that, while engaged, was not exactly made up of midnight movie veterans. A particularly grating moment featuring Mia Goth’s character inspired one film-goer to irritably shout “Shut the fuck up!” Like, at the screen. It takes a lot to get kicked out of the Drafthouse these days.

I digress. Skarsgård is a force here, channeling his feral turn in The Northman as merely one layer of a performance that pours off the screen like the lava flows at the end of that film. His portrayal of James Foster is so compelling it’s a shame to realize he will absolutely, positively not be nominated for an Academy Award for this weird-ass movie.

And yet, despite the shortcomings of its story, Infinity Pool lingers in the mind. The metaphor of a luxury swimming pool initially seems a bit too on the nose, but continues to reveal new facets, a trompe l’oeil tricking the eye to appear as endless as the desire for money, freedom, love, second chances.