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.

Possessor (Uncut)

We Can Dismember
It For You Wholesale

Possessor (Uncut)
UK/Canada 2020
Directed by Brandon Cronenberg
Rhombus Media/Rook Films

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Possessor Uncut, as it’s now being called by the IMBD, to somehow differentiate it from the censored US home video version I guess, is the second feature film by Brandon Cronenberg. It’s the first one I’ve seen by him and, when I sat down to watch it, I tried to promise myself that I would try not to compare it to the works of his illustrious father, David. Easier said than done however and, I hope I don’t do the gentleman an injustice in saying that this does feel like an extension of the kind of high concept sci-fi and body horror films of Cronenberg Sr. You will probably see elements in terms of ideas which could be said to share common DNA with his fathers films... conceptually like the wonderful eXistenZ but in terms of certain elements of production design, a raft of movies like Shivers (reviewed here), Rabid (reviewed here) and so on through to around about Videodrome. I say this as a compliment rather than as a negative vibe and I certainly hope the reader will take it as such.

In the film we are introduced to Tasya Vos, played by Andrea Riseborough (Mandy from... err.. Mandy, reviewed here)... who is a ferocious assassin, somewhat estranged but, not completely, from her young boy and husband (played by Rossif Sutherland, son of Donald). She basically utilises technology which transports her psyche into another person’s body so she can carry out hits for the company she works for, becoming the dominant personality in that body. She then has to be ‘pulled out’ from the body she’s cohabiting, remembering to shoot herself, preferably through the brain, as she exits, so to leave no trace behind of what has happened. She is run by Girder, played by the always brilliant Jennifer Jason Leigh as her controller and, after she pulls out, she is given a series of basic tests to make sure the experience hasn’t left her tainted with the personality of the person she has been inhabiting for the required number of days of body infiltration.

As the processes of the film and various things are revealed, we also realise Tasya is kind of cracking up. Something is very wrong and, when she goes to see her husband, whom she is half separated from, she has to rehearse herself to sound like herself, just as she rehearses phrases and tones of expression of the people who she’s going to jump into. There’s also a somewhat psychotic tendency that seems to be developing in her. The very strong opening, where the wonderfully lit, beautiful sets are splashed with the blood of her latest kill, as we see her personality in action, demonstrates that, rather than go for a very quick, clean kill, she prefers to not use a pistol and instead use sharp objects like knives (or even relatively blunt ones) to repeatedly attack the people she is sent to kill.

And, of course, once she jumps into the person who is going to be the unwilling perpetrator of her next hit, Colin Tate (played by Christopher Abbott), things start to go a bit pear shaped for her and the edges begin to blur between who she is and who she is inhabiting. Is she the dominant personality anymore and, if not, how will she get out after her latest act of highly paid violence.

It’s a cool film which uses colour well. The director tends to use the clinical whites of his personal cinematic legacy, mixed in with warm reds and oranges for a good deal of the film. Indeed, after the opening set piece of violent demise, Tasya has her host body rub her hand in the blood and it’s a colourful, visual metaphor as she ensures ‘the mark’, so to speak, is caught literally red handed before ensuring she is blown away by security. And then, as if to say “No, you’ve not got me just yet!”, Cronenberg suddenly introduces the office surrounding of the next mark, Colin Tate, which is just huge swathes of green bashing against the rest of the film’s colour palette. Lovely stuff.  

The film also pushes a few other literary and cinematic buttons as it makes its way towards a conclusion which is, for the most part, highly satisfying. For example, this is a really old plot device. Once again, as I have been constantly for the last ten or so years of American cinema, I am confronted with the visualisation of old 1950s/60s science fiction magazine style concepts. I’ve long gotten tired of this but that’s usually because the writers and directors who filch these ideas don’t execute them in anything other than a lethargic manner. Cronenberg does it very well and, like one or two films of his pop's, this one seems to play out like something you might find in a Philip K. Dick novel. Indeed, right at the start, the actress playing the current host body to Vos has to go through a process which the audience later comes to understand as a recalibration exercise to maintain the connection between the host and the assassin. However, as soon as I saw this done the first time, I felt like I was looking at someone who was using a similar device to the Mood Organs used in Philip K. Dick’s novels Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (filmed as Blade Runner, reviewed here) and We Can Build You.

Another thing I think I spotted is the influence, perhaps, of the good old Italian giallo cinema on the odd scene or two. After taking a severe beating, actor Sean Bean’s character has his face pinned to the floor through the centre of it with some kind of iron poker and his eye popped out in a sequence which is fairly picturesque and with a mise en scène that just screams giallo. It felt to me like it had a common thread to the films of Dario Argento, specifically Tenebrae (reviewed here). I was surprised when, reading the trivia on the IMDB after I’d watched this, the director does admit Argento as one of the influences on this film, specifically his wonderful giallo Opera. Like I said, that’s not the film I would have said was the most like this but, if Cronenberg is not talking about the slickness of his cinematic violence then it may be that he’s talking about the duality of the central protagonist in Opera, sharing a somewhat confused attitude to the murders she witnesses.

The film has an equally compelling score to it by Jim Williams which is, alas, not available as a proper CD option at the time of writing (and I’m not going for a stupid electronic download, thanks very much). This revs up the tension in certain places in the film, quite literally, as it sometimes sounds not unlike the noise made by someone revving up their motor vehicle engine... but in a musical way. This is a nice touch and really works well here. I’d love to hear this as a stand alone listen.

At any rate, Possessor... or Possessor Uncut, if you prefer (and that would be the one to go for if you intend watching it), is a really nice little masterpiece of science fiction cinema and fans of Cronenberg senior will, I’m sure, have a good time with this one. It’s got a wonderful ending (which didn’t get nearly as convoluted as I thought it was going to but, you know, sometimes simplicity doesn’t have to be a cop out) and I’m having a really hard time, to be honest, trying to figure out what the censors in the US could actually find to cut out of this. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen in previously certified films and, honestly, it says more about the strange mindset of the people who demand these cuts than it does about the pieces of art they are defacing. Seek out the uncut version of Possessor, for sure. It’s a really nice piece of movie making and I hope its not taken as an insult if I say that Brandon Cronenberg’s movie easily lives up to the masterpieces of the art form that his dad crafted. Now I have to try and see his first film, Antiviral, at some point soon. Which, you know, would certainly be on topic for the kind of year we are having, I would guess.