Critics reviews

Infinity Pool is the third and the best film to date from Brandon Cronenberg... The film’s woozy spectacles do eventually become numbing, as does Goth’s turn as the yowling ringleader, but that’s all in line with the experience. It wouldn’t be a real vacation if you weren’t ready for things to end at least a day before you’re scheduled to leave.

Pure shock cinema can often feel like empty artistic masturbation, and it’s tempting to accuse Cronenberg of doing so with his works, especially given the wild swings and orgiastic setpieces of Infinity Pool. But there’s just more under the hood than your typical imitators... Wrap it up in a package this wild, shocking, and perverse, and it makes for a delightful bloody mess that you’ll want to go back to.

Infinity Pool manages to one-up Brandon Cronenberg’s imposing legacy... even if this is a film that does not always make perfect sense, Infinity Pool is a film that does not shrink from its transgressions.

Soaked in an atmosphere of unrelenting dread, “Infinity Pool” works its canted camera angles and insistent, drumbeat-heavy score to transfixing effect... Skarsgard is marvelous... and Goth is a human interrobang, silken and seductive one minute, banshee-like the next. The performances sync perfectly with a movie that, in common with its titular amenity, is without visible limits; but there’s more going on here than a nihilistic tableau of unrestrained privilege.

A movie this technically skilled – and, in its way, gutsy – should deserve more than a Jean Brodie-ish acknowledgment that, for people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they’ll like. But in the absence of anything that might mitigate or contextualise Cronenberg’s atrocity exhibition – like, say, the affecting, complex parental themes of Possessor – it’s hard to say much else.

Infinity Pool sees Brandon Cronenberg embracing his characters’ bacchanalian revelry with tripped-out intensity, deploying strobing lights, camera spins, liquefying psychedelic effects, and ambient musician Tim Hecker’s claustrophobic score to disorient and overwhelm the viewer. If David Cronenberg seems almost indifferent to his audience, his son is so fixated on freaking people out that he can sometimes neglect to do much else.

Cronenberg’s new film is less formally inventive and icy than Possessor, more narratively straightforward if no less disturbingly weird and grisly. But the go-for-broke extremity lacks the substance to make it more than an aggressive but shallow provocation. So many movies have needled one-percent privilege in recent years that sheer shock value... doesn’t quite cut it without a fresh perspective.

[Infinity Pool] is Cronenberg’s “Eyes Wide Shut” by way of “The White Lotus”; it is in conversation with “Triangle of Sadness,” but it also seems to be a deeply personal film about an artist confronting his insecurities and finding a transformation, of sorts, in pure abandon and submission... Most of all, it cements Cronenberg as one of our greatest cinematic freaks.

The director, who is the son of filmmaker David Cronenberg, seems to have inherited some of his father’s worst excesses, which are here unleashed in a manner that is sophomoric, fetishistically violent and hyper-sexualized.

For a film filled with provocative and punishing imagery, it’s remarkable how little of it actually sticks in one’s mind once the credits roll. The “more is more” approach... is attention-securing in the moment but oddly forgettable after, like waking up from a nightmare you can’t remember. Infinity Pool is too hectic to truly haunt.

Though it loses some narrative thrust in an orgiastic second half, Infinity Pool remains a coherent, altogether ambitious play on “eat-the-rich” commentaries that have more frequently infiltrated pop culture. Where The White Lotus climaxes with an untimely death, Cronenberg never flinches from pointing the pistol (and his finger) at these thoughtless killers early and often.

Infinity Pool is the best horror-satire about Americans (and Brits, and one Austrian) abroad since Hostel... There are a lot of weird touches in this movie, and all of them serve a purpose; even the Leatherface-esque masks seen in the trailer have a dual function, enhancing the sense of depersonalization and evoking the commodification of native cultures.