Infinity Pool

 

 Seconds Chances

Infinity Pool
Canada/Croatia/Hungary 2023
Directed by Brandon Cronenberg
Film Forge

Infinity Pool is director Brandon (son of David) Cronenberg’s third feature length movie and, I have to say, although I’ve only now seen two of his movies, I was a little disappointed in this new one. I’ve not seen Antiviral (yet... will do at some point) but I liked his movie Possessor, quite a bit more than this one, I think.

Now, I have to say that people on Twitter have been all over this one for a while and, it’s not hard to see why because, the released stills with some truly horrible face masks being worn by people are quite striking. And it’s been getting some really good reviews from followers I trust. There’s even been the usual ‘walkouts and fainting in the aisles’ kind of ‘so negative it’s completely positive’ style tales from early screenings. So I was a little puzzled to find that, for all the talk of being incredibly violent and sexy... it’s kinda not really straying too far into either of those terrains.

It is good sci-fi though and it does have a heck of a lot of good stuff going for it so... I think take any negativeness in this review with a pinch of salt. I think there are a couple of things which have maybe swayed my view of the film and let me get those out the way first, or at least qualify them to my readers... because I really wanted to like this movie and I happen to think that people like Brandon Cronenberg are cinematic visionaries who deserve to own the future of cinema.

I think I’ve either become too jaded by things I see in movies these days or, quite possibly, it’s not me and there’s just nothing new under the sun. That last shouldn’t be a problem for me... because when is it ever? But maybe my expectations of this writer/director at this point are a bit too high and it may be that I return to this film in ten years time able to appreciate it more for what it is, rather than for something it isn’t.

Secondly, it seems to wear some of those influences on its sleeve, not by dint of the fact that the plot (which I won’t get into here because I don’t want to post spoilers on this one) seems like it’s inspired by things I think I can easily see... but because, in this case, the film I’m absolutely convinced was at least a partial influence on this one, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (the one starring Rock Hudson, remember?) is just not one of those films I can personally bond with. It might be something to do with the fact that upper classes can pay their way through any horrible accident or decision with no thought or consequence to the pain and misery they create for others they use to scapegoat their ‘adult playground’ attitudes but... yeah, this is not an area of cinema I particularly enjoy myself. Although I know many people love Seconds so, if there’s one thing I think I can safely say it’s that, Infinity Pool will at least have a lot of fans. Especially in the younger crowds, I suspect, who might not have been exposed to so many similar movies yet.

A special shout out goes, also, to the always incredible Mia Goth, who’s partying attitude throughout this somewhat mirrors, in my opinion, the psychological trajectory that Rock Hudson goes through in the earlier film. Okay... all the actors in this movie are amazing. Asides from the amazing Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård (always very reliable) giving amazing performances, they are backed up by a load of other great performers like Cleopatra Coleman and Thomas Kretschmann. So all very strong actors in this film and, if you’re going to do science fiction of this internalised yet ostentatious manner, you need reliable performances like these to help build and retain credibility.

Asides from this you have the director’s handling of the camera and how it does and, more importantly, how it doesn’t reveal things. The movie starts in darkness with just two voices until curtains are pulled back in a hotel room. This is followed by a very dizzying montage of swirling, 360 degree horizontal rotation segments which, frankly, annoyed me almost as much as the annoying fast edits in the more hallucinogenic sequences of the film. Then I realised that this stuff was all done to deliberately disorient the viewer to maybe stop the brain box from kicking in quite so fast on the more obvious moments in the plot.

And another tactic the director uses in a similar manner is to repeat those obvious moments ad infinitum so that, even though you probably already know what’s going on, it’s rendered immaterial as a significant plot turn by a certain way through the running time. So, there’s a point early on, without giving any of the plot away, where an actor can either be playing character A or he could be playing, let’s call it character AB. I made a choice about what an obvious sleight of hand switch on identity was pretty early on but, this occurrence, like a series of Russian dolls being opened (maybe as represented by urns holding a dead character’s ashes, in the case of this movie), is then repeated where, well, it just doesn’t really matter anymore. Only to Skarsgård’s character who, to be fair, is obviously haunted by his own lack of ability to differentiate what has happened right to the very end of the film.  

That being said, while the end of the movie is deliberately vague and attempting to be haunting... it kinda felt a little too much like a cop out to me, it has to be said. Nothing wrong with it... I just felt like it wasn’t a strong enough ending myself. Like if you’d been conducting a science experiment and got a result which you didn’t really care about either way. And, in terms of entertainment levels on the obvious things it’s more or less being sold on... I didn’t think there was that much sex or violence as it’s been hyped for (put this against any 1970s or 80s B movie exploitation movie and this one would look decidedly low key and out of place, it has to be said). Not that this is particularly what the director was going for, to be fair but then, why have so many people concentrated on this aspect?

At the end of the day, I was sadly just not impressed by Infinity Pool and I wouldn’t particularly recommend it to anyone unless they were going purely to see how the camera can capture things in a beautiful way and throw it around to create certain emotional responses (of sorts, I kinda didn’t feel much either, to be fair). This doesn’t mean it’s not a good film, by the way... quite the contrary. It just means I didn’t respond to it with the same level of appreciation that I suspect a lot of good people will. So lets see what happens and I’ll take another look at it in another decade, if I’m still around.

The East

Eastern Promise

The East
2013 USA/UK
Directed by Zal Batmanglij
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: Light spoilers in this one.

Okay. So I’m gonna find it hard going constructing a review for this particular film because The East, as it turns out, is almost a perfect movie going experience. A film of some small but not insubstantial power and put together with a kind of European sensitivity, applied to an almost Hollywood package.

Now I’ve seen this movie described as a thriller or an eco thriller by a number of people but, to be honest, although there are a few sequences of tension scattered throughout the whole shenanigans, it has to be said that it’s more of an environmental awareness and bonding movie which just happens to use some of the trappings of the post-forties thriller movie within its chemical make-up, to hang a narrative around the central idea of a main protagonist whose world view changes when she comes into close contact with, for want of a better terminology, a bunch of eco terrorists.

The main protagonist, Sarah (played by Brit Marling), is an undercover spy for a big private security firm (the type of firm who are kind of on a level with the FBI etc) and her job is to find a new eco terrorist threat group called The East and penetrate them to a level where she can gain intelligence (and possibly avert disaster) for some of her boss’ high level clients. As such, all the common spy gimmicks like false cover phone numbers, hidden shoe phones and the like are employed, quite neatly and pretty much unobtrusively, as it happens, throughout the main narrative thrust of the movie. I can see why these kinds of tropes were used, to be honest. Modern audiences are more likely to go see a movie which claims to be a thriller rather than a huggy, clean environment cult movie... so that kind of misdirection gets my vote. I only saw the movie, to be honest, because I’d actually seen the trailer for it (for once) and I loved what I was seeing... though again, the trailer is pretty much mostly culled from the first five minutes of the movie and makes it look much more of a documentary than it actually is.

The direction is assured and the editing superb. Combining a variety of styles to give it the cinema verite feel it lacks in actual content, ranging from slow but hand held camera work to fast cuts and a series of montage sequences comprising still photographs taking relevant points to tell its... well story is probably not the right word here, but certainly it gives you a sense of what the director wants you to get into your head.

The performances are also absolutely amazing, with Brit Marling being outstanding and ably backed up by Alexander Skarsgard (who really is becoming as much of a name as his famous dad), Ellen Page, Toby Kebbell and, my real main reason for seeing this film, Patricia Clarkson, who does an excellent job in, sadly, only a few scenes scattered throughout the movie, as Sarah’s unflinching boss.

My two slight criticisms are as follows.

The movie at one point plays out the old “Parable Of The Long Spoons”... that’s the one where the people in Hell starve because they can’t work out what the people in Heaven, in exactly the same circumstances, have worked out... you can feed each other and get to the food. I’d be really surprised in this day and age if people are not familiar with this old story, which used to do the rounds everywhere, and so I found it odd that the drawn out sequence (which is a kind of task set as an initial indoctrination into The East) is kinda played for tension and surprise... when the solution is so obvious. Also, since the solution is so obvious, one wonders why a sophisticated employee of a security firm such as Sarah would not already know the solution to her predicament. This kind of stretched the plausibility of the character a little for me, it has to be said.

My only other gripe is with the narrative element of the film. It uses this thriller narrative to hook people into the real issues and that’s fair enough... but did it have to be so obvious a narrative? Honestly, as soon as the leader of the cult said that their would be three jams (aka terrorist hits) involving big companies, it seemed pretty obvious to me what the identity of the third company would turn out to be and the moral dilemma it would place on one of the central characters in the movie. However, the nice thing about the ending of the movie... the very ending after the leader of The East has fled the clutches of the FBI, is that the main protagonist presents you with a third narrative option that I didn’t really figure out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s no mind blowing twist or reveal... that’s not what this movie is about. But it is a nice option and makes for a slightly under-the-radar ending and certainly it helps elevate the movie to something I found really solid as opposed to relying on yet another structural cliché.

The East is a youth movie about the kinds of concerns that probably should be important to people. It’s message is sound and, if the character dynamics are a bit hackneyed, it doesn’t really matter because the execution of these clichés is, for the most part, impeccable. Definitely a solid watch and a strong recommendation from me. Head east if you want a slice of morality served up with your entertainment.