Infinity Pool Parent Guide

James (Alexander Skarsgard) and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are enjoying a luxurious vacation on the beautiful tropical beaches of Latoka, but there’s a catch: they have to stay on the resort grounds. Latoka is a violent, dangerous country, with strict laws and brutal punishments. The resorts are essentially fortified compounds as the local population has been known to attack tourists. The resort doesn’t provide everything James and Em want, so they tag along for a daytrip outside the fence with Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert), two other guests at the hotel. Driving back in the dark, James unintentionally hits a farmer with their car, killing him on the spot. The couples make it back to the resort, but the police soon track them down and Latokan justice must be served.

James is sentenced to death, specifically to be killed by the 13-year-old son of the man he killed – but he doesn’t have to die himself. The Latoka government, with an eye to maintaining good diplomatic relations with other countries and a healthy tourism industry, has an expensive alternative. James can pay to have a perfect clone of himself created who will die in his place. After watching himself, or at least, a version of himself murdered by a 13-year-old, James starts feeling a little strange. Thankfully, he has someone to talk to: Some of the other tourists at the resort have been through the same thing, and even stranger, they seem to enjoy it…

Infinity Pool is less a film and more a gruesome fever dream, two hours of drug-fueled, orgiastic, bloody, delirium which spits its audience back into a theater with a lot of questions and a vaguely dirty feeling. The film is equally focused on maintaining that odd, disturbing aesthetic and on telling any kind of coherent story - and sometimes the story gets shoved roughly into the backseat. Which is really too bad, because this sort of satirical sci-fi horror isn’t something you see all that often, and I’d be more interested in exploring some of the fundamental premises of the narrative than wallowing in the amoral soup the film kept ducking me in.

It’s apparent that director Brendan Cronenberg is (as the name might suggest) the son of David Cronenberg. The film enjoys the same kind of visceral ickiness that has become so much of Cronenberg the Elder’s style, although not quite to the nauseating extent as films like Crimes of the Future. There’s a lot of bloody violence, to be sure, but this film has a lot more unsettling sexual content than violence. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much graphic sexual activity in a movie before. If you’re the kind of person who cares enough about movie content to be reading this website, you’re not going to want to watch this movie. Ever.