I haven't seen any of Brandon Cronenburg's previous films, so I'm a bit fresh in terms of his recurring motifs; obviously I'm quite familiar with the work of his body horror-obsessed father. Brandon takes a much more cerebral tack that's still quite terrifying in its implications.
**Spoiler Alert!** for the entire film - so if you haven't seen it, go out and see it!
I. Synopsis
Writer James Foster and his wife Em are vacationing at a resort in the fictional land of Li Tolqa, a vaguely Mediterranean locale with white sand beaches. While there, James meets a beautiful female guest who claims to be a huge fan of his (only) book; she invites James and his wife to dinner. There Gabi tells them she is an infomercial actress, and her Swiss husband designs infinity pools like the ones used by the Resort and wealthy local functionaries. After a night of dancing and drinking, during which James becomes more and more bewitched by Gabi, they make plans to take a trip outside the Resort - an action highly frowned upon by the authorities. After a drive through the beautiful but rugged countryside, they arrive at a secluded beach (complete with a burned-out car) and proceed to picnic and get drunk. James sneaks off to urinate, where he is surprised by Gabi, who gives him a rough handjob. With night approaching, the four pile into the car, which James claims he is okay to drive.
Speeding in the darkness, a clearly intoxicated James crashes into a man walking across the road in the dark and kills him. The terrified tourists consider calling the police, but Gabi shoots down the idea, claiming that Em will be raped and killed. They jump in the car and drive back to the Resort, where James stumbles into his bed and passes out.
The next morning he awakens to the police at their door. They are hustled into a van and taken to a dilapidated building, where they are separated. To James' horror, anofficial informs him that because he has killed a Li Tolqan, the man's son must now pay the blood debt by killing James. However, because this would create diplomatic difficulties, Li Tolqa has developed a "Doubling" process to create an exact replica of foreign offenders, who will then be killed in their stead - for a hefty fee. James eagerly pays the fee, and is locked in a shower facility where he experiences bizarre hallucinogenic visions. Upon awakening he is reunited with Em and taken to a room with a shrouded figure on a table. The official pulls back the shroud to reveal an exact duplicate of James. The figure awakens with a gasp, causing Em and James to panic and run from the room.
They are taken to a small, dimly-lit arena. James' Double is tied to a stake in the middle of the floor, and a native boy is ushered into the arena and handed a long knife. The boy proceeds to viciously stab James' Double to death. Em is clearly horrified, but James seems more excited than distraught.
They return to the Resort, where Em hurriedly begins packing; but James claims to have lost his passport. Gabi finds James stumbling around in the lobby, where she knowingly tells him the Doubling process "changes you". He meets Gabi and her husband for drinks, where they reveal that they, too were Doubled for accidentally killing a worker. Later James is introduced to Gabi's circle of friends, all tourists who have been Doubled for various crimes - blasphemy, sodomy, and drug use, among others. They speculate as to whether they are the originals, or the duplicates, or whether it even matters at all; they all agree that they have gone through a profound existential experience and emerged changed. After a night of partying and drinking, they decide to go on a "mission" to steal a medal from the official who had Gabi and her husband Doubled. The group sneak out to the official's house and hold him and his entourage at gunpoint while they ransack the house; they are surprised by a security guard, and in the ensuing gunfight the official and other Li Tolqans are killed.
We next see the group in the holding cell, dressed in white robes, gleefully discussing last night's "antics" and, supposedly, the prospect of seeing their Doubles killed for their amusement. Suddenly guards burst in and force them down the hall to the arena, where they realize they are the ones about to be killed. The group looks up to see themselves applauding from the bleachers: they are the Doubles. They then have their throats slit, to the cheers of their audience.
The next morning, Em leaves James. Gabi appears and comforts him, then leads him back to her room and burns a sacred local root, which she informs him is a "hallucinogen and aphrodisiac." The drug takes effect, and they have sex. Through his hallucination, James sees Gabi's friends writhing across the room and engaging in weird rituals. After the orgy the group goes on another "mission", kidnapping a hooded, bound figure dressed in a police uniform and encouraging James to beat him. Just as he is about to deliver a knockout blow, Gabi pulls off the hood to reveal that the man is in fact James' Double. Shaken, James retrieves his passport and takes a bus to the airport. The bus is intercepted by Gabi and her friends, who force James to come out by threatening the passengers. Gabi mocks his failed writing career, causing James to snap and attack Gabi, but his weak efforts are only laughed at by the group. He runs off into the forest while Gabi shoots at him, wounding him.
James takes refuge in a farmhouse, where he dreams about the boy who killed his first Double attempting to strangle him. Awakening for real, James walks outside in the night to see Gabi and the tourist group, holding his Double on a leash. When James refuses to "sacrifice the dog", his Double lunges forward and tries to kill James, but he beats the Double to death instead. Gabi kneels down and presents her breast to the stricken James, who proceeds to suckle.
The following morning Gabi and the tourists prepare to go home. On the bus to the airport they chat about ordinary, banal things like errands and chores, as though the events of the last week never happened. James is completely shocked by their change in demeanor. The final shot of the movie shows the Resort closed down for the season under a driving rain; James sits alone in a deck chair, unable to move out from under the downpour.
II. Analysis
A Deceitful Pool
An infinity pool is an above-ground swimming pool, usually at a resort overlooking the ocean, artfully constructed to look like it has no edge: the water appears to flow over the side and merge with the ocean beyond. As a metaphor for wealth and privilege, I think it's excellent: the experience is constructed in such a way that the swimmer never has to confront their own limits, nor look down and see anything but the ocean and its horizon. In actuality this pool is held up by heavy walls that block any view of the local surroundings, especially poverty or unrest surrounding the resort. The pool itself is only a tiny, saltless, tame imitation of the ocean, maintained at the perfect temperature for the comfort of the guests. Gabi's husband was in the process of building a special infinity pool with a glass bottom, meaning the tourists below could gawk at the tourists above, and vice-versa...they never have to see anyone except each other and the servants who wait on them hand and foot. They have come to this place to escape their banal existence, only to recreate that very existence on the land they have colonized.
Colonizer and Colonized
This film is heavy and oppressive with this theme, of the Colonizer and Colonized. The Resort, generic and bland, could have been set on any white sand beach, with the same sated tourists lounging on verandas or under umbrellas; our first glimpse of any trouble (besides the foreboding, vertigo-inducing opening sequence) is when a local plows his ATV across the beach, scattering tourists like scared chickens and crushing beach toys beneath his wheels. Gabi tells James this revolutionary wants to "Put a long knife through the throat of every tourist". We are subsequently informed that "Visitors aren't allowed outside the Resort area", and realize it is a veritable prison topped with razor wire - whether to protect the tourists from the locals, or vice-versa. Cronenburg cleverly keeps the point of view planted squarely behind the eyes of the Colonizers, giving only glimpses of the forbidding mountainous countryside, ramshackle huts behind barb wire, and strange elevated pipes outside the Resort walls. Their culture isn't explained, except for the vaguely Balkan atmosphere, the strange masks, dirgelike music, sacred hallucinogenic roots, and of course the ironclad code of blood that necessitates their mysterious Doubling process. If not for the Doubling, the killing of foreigners would call down the wrath of foreign powers upon Li Tolqa; if the killing of criminals was suppressed, the People would revolt against the regime. The Doubling is a means of survival, a government caught between its subjects and the Colonizers. The corrupt local government is willing to take foreign cash at the expense of its own people, who could never afford to Double their own lost kin, and leave them only the empty consolation of killing a token sacrificial victim. But even this is evidence that the Colonizers are deeply afraid of the intensity of the natives' hatred for them; at the end of the movie, James hallucinates the boy who killed his first Double recognize him and proceed to gleefully choke him: the hands of the Colonized will forever be at the throats of the Colonizers, and one slip, one moment's weakness, will spell their destruction. Li Tolqa in particular, though looking like a prison camp outside the Resort's walls and filled with subservient locals within, will never be fully cowed. Just as the roads must detour around the forbidding walls of limestone, so too must the Colonizers reckon with the unbending will of the Li Tolqan people.
But if sheer force won't dominate Li Tolqa, the slow wearing of time surely will. Even granite mountains are at the mercy of steady erosion over the eons. And Colonizers - here represented by James and his new friends - are essentially immortal. In revolutionary terms, we can see a progression: first the Colonized, represented by the boy whose father was killed, directly attack their overlords - only to have the deposed replaced by an identical set of rulers. Next the local State executes the Colonizers - only to have them replaced by an exact replica. Finally there is no one left to kill the Colonizers, except the Colonizers themselves - James beats his own reflected self to death. Just as in the end of George Orwell's Animal Farm, when the Donkey looked from the Pigs to the Farmers and couldn't tell the difference, so too are each successive set of rulers doubled and reflected until they form one seemingly continuous line out to the horizon, and no one remembers a time before they existed. The changeovers of regimes, violent as they may be, simply don't register when one tabulates the final equation of wealth and domination.
Along with Colonization comes appropriation of culture, with its accompanying bastardization. Local workers are made to dress up as other Colonized and marginalized cultures - Chinese coolies, Bollywood dancers, Hasidic Jews - to provide the tourists with a "multicultural experience"; they are only allowed two tiny dabs of paint on their faces to express their own culture. To unleash their inner "strength", James and his new friends abuse sacred ritual herbs and don locally-made masks, corrupting ancient traditions to dissociate from their banal, comfortable lives. In this grotesque bacchanal they feel free to do anything, to go anywhere, to kill humans for sport, all without consequence.
I don't think the Doubling process produces a corrupted copy, like a psychopathic clone (although you can read it that way); I think it's important that the Double is an exact replica of the original, even spiritually. These characters existed in a state of wealth, that up until this point had insulated them from anything real in life; then their empty, dissatisfied existences were shattered by the sharp smell of blood. It was the process of watching himself being killed, of participating vicariously in his own disembowelment, that awakened something in James. His own alienation was both interrupted and completed by witnessing his own death. It is interesting that his new friends (whom I think of as, "the Cult") views this process completely differently from the native peoples and the local government, for whom it is a cultural and political necessity; for these foreigners, cocooned in their own wealth and narcissism, it's a "spiritual experience". They don't have to reckon with death, only the thrill of it, and that is the closest they'll ever come to transcendence. Their wealth, and the power that comes with it to cheat death while still vicariously experiencing its heady throes, comes together to produce a kind of ideology.
And that ideology is naturally fascistic. Not in the sense of literal Nazis, but containing the elements listed in Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism": strength, domination, the worship of death, and the viewing of all other races as sub-human. Gabi is the mouthpiece of this ideology: how many times does she exhort James to "be strong", especially when he refuses to kill wantonly? And when she refers to the native peoples as "barely human" and "like baboons"? These attitudes and actions, more than just the cavorting of "liberated" aristocrats, give a much more sinister impression: the Cult believes they are meant to rule. By dint of their death and rebirth, and their essential immortality, they are now gods. Even their "bits of fun" are in fact quite serious and systematic, both breaking down James' will and attacking members of the local government. And just like real fascists (online, anyway) they attempt to deflect critism - and critical thinking - by claiming they're only joking. The cherry on top is the sudden realization, as they take the shuttle to the airport, that they are just ordinary affluent people, leading boring affluent lives; James is so shocked by this literal Banality of Evil that he cannot even bring himself to leave the Resort - the "real world" for him has been completely obliterated. And this shows that despite his best efforts, despite his indoctrination into their Cult, he is fundamentally unlike these people: he cannot dissociate himself from the things he has done and witnessed.
The Muse and the Man-Baby
My fiancée pointed out a striking artistic reference in the first half of the film: as Gabi seduces James, she takes on the visual motifs of Johannes Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring: she has almost invisible eyebrows, like the painting's subject, and sports strings of pearls; the framing as she dances is the same 3/4 over-the-shoulder glance as in the painting. To James, she is the object of his gaze; he explained earlier (rather lamely) that he had come to the resort looking for "inspiration", and at first it seems that the lithe Gabi is going to "inspire" him. But James is quite mistaken if he thinks Gabi is nothing more than a jolt for his dead creative batteries: she has much bigger plans for this malleable lump of a man. Gabi goes from being a muse in the modern sense of the word, to being a mythic Muse - an obsessive, demanding goddess, first enticing and then forcing James through a transformation he doesn't quite understand. Whether he is a writer or not, or has any talent, or will ever publish another work again, he is still an artist beset by an inspiring force which he has no control over and which may yet drive him, as the gods are wont to do, into madness.
And James is certainly malleable, both in body and in spirit, a sort of protean man-shape. He is Doubled, as if a mold has been made that another James can be poured into. After his second Doubling, we see for a moment the point of view switched: the cult is hustled into the execution chamber where, after a token struggle by James, they have their throats slit; their Doubles (or their Originals?) applaud from the bleachers, as if watching a puppet show. The new (or old) James is now a "baby", constantly drooling and engaging in juvenile pranks and asinine, impulsive behavior. He's suddenly brought to his senses when, after beating a hooded victim with his fists, Gabi rips off the hood to reveal that this is yet another of James' Doubles, his own "babies". When James attempts to flee the cult pursues him, forcing him off the bus while Gabi taunts him for being a weak and cowardly "baby". Her implication is that he has to grow up, to take on his power, by killing his "dog" self - the Double - but as soon as he accomplishes this, Gabi offers him her breast to suckle. He is, and forever shall be, her baby.
Yet James was always a baby. He relies on his wife's fortune to carry him through life. He doesn't even know, at first, what country he's in. He's waited on hand and foot and served up pampered, puerile experiences by workers who only speak his language and often dress up in costumes for his diversion. Nowhere is he ever challenged or confronted by life, up until the point when he kills another human being. Yet even then, he has no agency - others are always taking charge for him, and despite some token resistance, he seems resigned to be forced along by circumstance and happenstance. At the end of the film he is so catatonic, he never leaves the resort, nor even his own beach chair, his very survival instinct numbed as he sits in a monsoon rain. And though his friends may seem more "capable", they themselves are little more than followers, always seeking "fun", referred to by the police as "foreign babies" treating the country like a "playground".
The only character with any agency is Gabi, the de facto leader of the Cult, whose very profession - that of an actress on "There's Gotta Be a Better Way!"-style infomercials - is a deception and a manipulation. On these commercials, she is a genius at "finding ways to fail" at the simplest tasks, in order to convince the viewer they need to buy some overpriced, over-engineered gadget to make their life complete. It's both a comment on the vapid emptiness of capitalism, and on Gabi's opportunistic ethos: like James, she feeds off of those around her, but unlike James she seizes the opportunities provided by her circumstances. But even this seeming agency is a deception. She does not seize power over the group, but rather floats to the top of the hierarchy simply by dint of her attractiveness and force of personality. While she actively taunts and entices James, she herself is being passively egged on by the Cult. She is like the head and mouth of a multi-bodied monster; though it seems like she is in charge, she is really beholden to the whims of the group, and goes along with whatever they feel like doing. In the same way that a reflection can only follow the viewer, so too can she only do whatever her "viewers" want her to do, while at the same time being their "viewers" and making them do what she wants.
Reflections and Possessions
The film's constant reiteration of reflections, doubles, and masks as motifs speaks to the concept of dissociation, of feeling detached from one's body and watching oneself as a spectator - and perhaps even of switching bodies, as a possessor. James is simply the spectator whose point of view we have aligned with, the character who we, as the moviegoing audience, are allowed to "possess". James exists in a state of detachment so profound that he never even touches his wife, which makes Gabi's sudden sexual assault (a handjob, sure, but still) all the more jarring. It is a precursor to the acts of possession that are to come, the rude violations that jar a pampered man out of his empty existence. The coercive process of Doubling, of being drowned in red liquid as a kind of reverse "birth", is accompanied by deeply sexual fractal hallucinations that even hint at a kind of precognition - vague reflections of future events in the film - that speaks of time itself being reflected, so that the past and future have no clear demarcation, but elide together like an infinity pool bleeding out into the ocean beyond. In his first Doubling, James becomes a spectator to his own death, experiencing the vicarious thrill like the member of a movie audience; in the second Doubling, he himself is the "actor", looking out at the audience and fighting against his own demise. Of course it doesn't matter which is the "real" James and which is the Double, since they are exact reflections, and the James behind the metaphorical "mirror" is as real and alive as the James in front of it. The Double that possesses James' body is not some evil outsider, though he may look at his reflection and think so; it is simply he himself, possessing his own body. The question then becomes: has James finally inhabited his own body, or has his detachment become so complete that his body is completely empty, lacking any soul? Is the "dog" self at the end of the movie, the one he must kill, simply an imperfect copy, or is it himself in a state of complete moral and psychological degradation? The film provides no answers; film itself, both in art and technique, is merely a reflection, a cleverly crafted void into which the audience can see itself - or even a new skin we can put on and inhabit.
The theme of possession is introduced very early in the movie, through a subtle moment disguised as a vapid cultural gesture. The tourists are greeted at the resort by a retinue of silent natives in grotesque local masks; the master of ceremonies explains that this is part of a local festival anticipating the rainy season. This celebration is called "The Summoning". While we assume The Summoning refers to the ritual summoning of rain, there's also the ominous connotation of magical summoning of spirits - perhaps even demons. The jarring disconnect between the Cult's actions and personalities on Li Tolqa and their banal "normal" lives outside the vacation spot looks a lot like possession; in donning the masks, they seem to take on new, outside spirits that drive their behavior. There's even a suggestion, at least on the surface, that the Doubling process somehow changes the participant: after his first Doubling, Em says that James has "gone funny around the eyes", as though a different personality is now inhabiting him; this is confirmed when he claims to have lost his passport - I immediately clocked this as a lie, and the movie later confirms his deception. The old James was a passive beige lump; the new James is suddenly cunning and watchful, thirsty for new experiences - and for blood. During the much-later hallucinogenic orgy sequence, James first sees Gabi and the rest of the cult without their masks, then suddenly wearing the masks. The masks cover the faces of their wearers, while at the same time reflecting the grotesque, twisted beings beneath - are these the visages of demonic possessors, or the true selves of the wearers finally revealed? I'd argue it's the latter, more than the former. Possession in this film is merely a misdirect, an excuse for the throwing off of societal inhibitions. There are no evil spirits, or local deities taking over these affluent tourists: the only evil here is the evil they brought with them. Only James, it seems, is not at peace with the devil within: while the other Cult members are perfectly blasé about casting off their "masks" and returning to the "real world", James is instead left empty, so profoundly shelled out that he simply remains at the Resort, a lump, waiting for the next Tourist season when the Cult comes back and again animates him with their unhinged and wicked spirit.
To possess; to reflect; to hide; to reveal; to Colonize and be Colonized. To be a spectator, and to be spectated upon. To be grimacing into a mirror, and to be trapped behind that mirror, forced to imitate your master's grimace. Infinity Pool, like its name, elides from the tiny placid pool of our own self-deception into the deep and treacherous existential ocean beyond. The characters deceive themselves and those around them, foisting upon others their own coercive violence and receiving their violence in reaction.
III. Review
So much for analysis - was it a good movie? Or more precisely in art-appreciation terms, "Does it accomplish what it sets out to do"?
What first jumps out at you is the cinematography; this is certainly a stylish film. Karim Hussain delivers a hybrid of high-def high-saturation with the slight fuzz of 70's filmmaking. The retro feel is carried through into the hallucinogenic sequences, which use mostly practical effects and filters to invoke the feel of a psychedelic retro music video. Faces are framed strangely, inducing a feeling of alienation, while conversations are punctuated with close-ups on mouths speaking, smoking, pursing. The mountainous countryside, filmed in Croatia, somehow presses out from the screen as if threatening to bury the audience in an avalanche of pale rock, while the sea meets the sky in images reminiscent of Rothko. The effect is of a place and characters both lush and muted, affluent and yet cold, so that even proximity carries a kind of emotional distance. The soundtrack is likewise unsettling: deep, quiet, filled with throbbing, distorted tones like the rush of blood through veins, punctuated by far-off high notes, like wind chimes in a rainstorm.
Mia Goth, recently of X and Pearl, is definitely the star here, terrifying as the seductively unhinged Gabi. She knows when to hold back and let the dialogue state her intentions, and when to curl her lips into an almost Joker-like grimace. Her retinue acts like a Greek Chorus, nearly wordless by the end, yet ably exuding jovial menace. Alexander Skarsgård, unfortunately, can't quite overcome the bland passivity of his character, even in the more violent sequences. An argument could be made that this is the point of a character with no agency, yet it felt like something more was required - for some reason I misremembered his character's name as soon as I left the theater. Cleopatra Coleman isn't given much to do as Em, completely disappearing by the second act.
As a whole, I left the movie feeling somehow...unsatisfied. Intellectually sated, definitely - trying to puzzle out "what it all meant" - but I think Cronenberg was ultimately trying to say too much without quite saying enough. As a critique of wealth and colonizer-mentality, it certainly limited itself by focusing squarely on the white, affluent tourists. What about the Li Tolqans? We never hear any of them speak or act except in relation to the foreigners, and then only as officials and Resort staff. Somehow I was hoping James' interaction with the locals would provide some kind of thematic counterpoint to the fascist murder-tourist philosophy of the Cult; yet somehow the film unwittingly confirms their unhinged ethos: the locals are either victims or aggressors, never real human beings. While I agree that it was clever of Cronenberg to keep Li Tolqan culture opaque and alien to the audience's eyes, it still skirted some uncomfortable territory, banking on the very cultural Othering the film tried to critique.
After much thinking and writing and re-writing paragraphs, I've finally figured out what ultimately doesn't work about Infinity Pool: the focus should've never strayed to the Cult's attempt to indoctrinate James Foster. Out of all the themes and concepts layered in this movie, one affluent white man's attempt to resist evil is certainly the least interesting. In terms of narrative this provides a source of conflict, but the stakes aren't really there - James is never presented as a decent man, just a sponger who almost immediately "gets a taste" for the creepy death-lust that unites the Cult. The film should have stuck to its brief and focused on the infinity poolishness of it all: reflections on reflections extending to infinity, the Doubling process, the reflective, endless cycle of violence and colonization.
All this isn't to say it wasn't a gorgeous, interesting mess of a film that I'm glad I watched. Like Joe Hill, author and son of Stephen King, Brandon Cronenberg takes his father's obsession with raw and visceral imagery and spins it into more sophisticated and deeply weird storytelling. No doubt he'll continue to streamline and deepen his screenwriting, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
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