With the Trippy New Horror Shocker Infinity Pool, Nepo Baby Brandon Cronenberg Does Right by His Old Man

Pappy Cronenberg should be proud! His boy takes after him!

I’ve long revered David Cronenberg as one of cinema’s true auteurs, a bona fide, legitimate Frightmaster with an incredible legacy and a remarkable body of work. You know a filmmaker has a distinctive style when their last name becomes an adjective and cinephiles and the public at large know what is meant by Cronenbergian. 

But David Cronenberg is something else as well. He’s somebody’s dad. He’s someone’s pa. He’s a pappy in addition to being internationally revered for his disturbing brand of body horror. 

Can you even imagine what it would be like to grow up with David Cronenberg as your dad? You’d want him to play catch or go to your little league games but he’d sit you down on his lap and tenderly explain that he and Uncle Jimmy (his name for James Woods) are making a crazy-ass mind-fuck about the New Flesh so he won’t be able to make it to your dance rehearsal or sixth grade performance of Seussical: The Musical. 

If you were to create the ultimate fright-master, someone even more twisted than M. Night Shyamalan, you would have to start with David Cronenberg as the provider of all-important baby batter. 

The mom would have to be a monster of some sort, such as a vampire, werewolf or mummy. I’m sure a sick fuck like David Cronenberg would have no problem procreating with a figure of ultimate darkness. The lunatic made a movie about a damn fly-man for the love of God. Nothing is sacred with him. 

Instead of watching Leave It to Beaver or The Andy Griffith Show, I’m sure David Cronenberg exposed his offspring to demented shit like The Addams Family and The Munsters. I have no doubt that in the Cronenberg household “The Monster Mash” was the big holiday song, not “White Christmas.”

Instead of the The Night Before Christmas I bet that disturbed individual showed his son the Nightmare Before Christmas. I can just imagine the Cronenberg house around Halloween: he probably put up a Jack-O-Lantern AND a skeleton with spooky red eyes. 

It must have been weird to go to Take Your Son to Work day with your dad and watch Elias Koreas fuck a car. You don’t get over shit like that. 

Brandon grew up thinking that the key to success and validation lie in making disturbing body horror classics expressing an unmistakable disgust with humanity and revulsion towards these failing meat-suits we call bodies. 

Is it any wonder Brandon followed his beloved pappy into the family business? Brandon’s work is predictably Cronenbergian. He comes about it honestly and naturally. 

But he’s also deeply influenced by Phillip K. Dick. Davey’s lad is fascinated by issues of identity and reality and madness and the frazzled blurring and destruction of the lines separating the three. 

The next generation of Cronenberg creates an aura of discomfort, panic and low-level despair in the savagely satirical tale of debauched tourists in a foreign land who end up paying a steep but fitting price for their murderous indifference to the suffering and deaths of others. 

The extremely handsome Alexander Skarsgard, himself a Nepo Baby made good (he’s Tom Arnold’s son), plays author James Foster. He’s a struggling writer with what I can personally attest is the single most relatable backstory imaginable: he’s depressed because of sub-par book sales. 

I would like to commend the production for being about something everyone can relate to, that is truly universal. In an extremely unsuccessful attempt to save a faltering marriage, the writer’s block-addled James and his much wealthier wife and benefactor Em (Cleopatra Coleman) take a trip to a resort on the fictional island of La Tolqa.

In its early going, Infinity Pool creates a free-floating sense of dread and confusion rooted in being a stranger in a strange land that you do not understand and whose customs and rituals seem unknowable and barbaric. 

James and Em are beautiful colonizers, wealthy oppressors who go on vacation hoping to pump new life into their failing bond. James’ devastated self-esteem gets a boost when the alluring and free spirited Gabi Bauer (Mia Goth) professes to be a fan of his novel and rewards him for his literary achievements with what appears to be a very rough and uncomfortable handjob, the kind Franklin Delano Roosevelt receives from his cousin in Hyde Park on the Hudson.

That’s the thing about handjobs: there’s something coarse and rough and disturbingly aggressive about the whole practice, a sense that you to suffer for pleasure, or rather “pleasure.” 

As played by the wildly charismatic, scene-stealing Goth, Gabi is an irresistible siren, a beguiling beacon of sex and danger, sin and addiction. She’s a demon of sensuality and depravity, a feral beast pulling James irrevocably past the point of no return. 

The beautifully hideous outsiders gorge themselves on the pleasures of the island before James drunkenly hits a local with his car, killing him in the process. He takes the coward’s way out by fleeing the scene of the crime but he’s apprehended quickly and offered a new kind of Faustian bargain. 

The rules and rituals of the region angrily demand vengeance and blood. Fortunately and unfortunately for our anti-heroes/villains, the authorities are also extremely corrupt and conducive to bribes. 

So while the law demands that someone die for James’ crimes he has the option of paying to have a genetic double die in his place. This genetic double has memories and emotions as well as the exact DNA of its clone. It not only has the ability to suffer: it exists pretty much solely to suffer.

This miraculous technology is not treated as something wondrous or revolutionary. Instead it’s treated casually as a grubby reality of a nightmarish dystopia where evil revelers pay several different forms of steep prices for their crimes against God and the island. 

We accept that in this world technology exists to create incredibly powerful, advanced, sophisticated clones but is used largely to facilitate bribery and local corruption because that’s dream logic and Infinity Pool has the hazy, disorienting quality of a waking nightmare. 

There are no heroes in Infinity Pool. There are no good guys, just people who are downright Satanic in their outsized evil and willingness to hurt and destroy anyone and anything to achieve their objectives and people who are moderately less evil.

The doubles that must be sacrificed to the great Gods of commerce and fake justice represent the good, moral, just parts of ourselves that must be shut off or ignored or dismissed because they tell us that the trade-off of affordable clothes or shoes in exchange for implicitly supporting child slave labor isn’t worth it and that we should value goodness over convenience.

Em’s sour disapproval is the only thing keeping James from being his worst self and indulging his most basic instincts. Once she returns to America and he stays he gives into his animal urges and becomes part of a sinister sub-culture united by the experience of having committed a terrible crime that was punished through the murdering of a genetic clone. 

If this all sounds very Black Mirror it should. Infinity Pool is continuously pulling the rug out from underneath us as it toys with doubles and duplicates and multiple levels of reality and unreality. 

It’s exhausting as well as impressive, a psychedelic mind-fuck that eschews the xenophobia inherent in its premise by constantly foregrounding the wickedness of the tourists. 

Brandon’s dad should be proud. Infinity Pool is a film worthy of Brandon’s old man and the king of twists, M. Night Shyamalan, whose latest I will be reviewing next week. 

It’s going to be fun! I’ll be writing up Knock at the Cabin and 80 for Brady. 

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