Infinity Pool film review — exquisitely violent sci-fi from Brandon Cronenberg

By all accounts, Alexander Skarsgård is a nice guy, surprisingly down to earth for one so uncannily good-looking and abdominally chiselled. And yet you can’t help worrying what the actor’s recent roles have done to his mental health. There have been sadists (Big Little Lies), men turned violent by trauma (The Northman) and entitled creeps who think it’s their right to shag their girlfriend’s underage daughter (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) or toy with people’s lives for fun (Straw Dogs), profit (Succession) or food (True Blood).

In Infinity Pool, he plays a character with all the colours from the victimised, violent posh-nob monster rainbow. James Foster is a blocked novelist holidaying on the (made-up) island of La Tolqa with his rich wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman). Bored with the idle luxury of the gated resort they’re not supposed to leave, James and Em take a day trip with another couple, giggly Gabi (horror high-priestess Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert).

When James accidentally kills a farmer and flees from the scene, local law demands he must pay reparations with his own life. But there’s a get-out-of-execution-free card: James can have a “double” of himself made and killed in his place. Later, as things get worse, we start to wonder which one was really bumped off, given that now there’s a “wrongness” around his eyes, “like a crab at the dump”, as Em puts it.

Writer-director Brandon Cronenberg definitely has a way with words, but he’s even more of a craftsman when it comes to visuals, especially trippy, CGI-laced montages. These accompany the characters’ drug binges, masked orgies and crazed crime sprees, which turn exquisitely violent. Like a run of other recent films and TV shows (The White Lotus, The Menu, most JG Ballard adaptations), Infinity Pool plays with the viewer’s lust for the trappings of wealth and repulsion for the people who have it.

As sophisticated, morally murky sci-fi, this is as good as Cronenberg’s father David Cronenberg at his best, up there with the likes of Dead Ringers, eXistenZ and Crash (itself a Ballard adaptation). But Cronenberg fils has his own particular aesthetic sensibility, palpable in the macro and ultra-wide angle lenses used by his cinematographer Karim Hussain. (They collaborated on the director’s two other, equally compelling-repellent features, Possessor and Antiviral.)

It’s bracingly nihilistic stuff, and in Skarsgård, Cronenberg has found his perfect leading man, a beautiful Übermensch full of boundless cruelty and self-loathing. Let’s hope he gets to do a kids’ film next.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from March 24