INFINITY POOL

Brandon Cronenberg’s laboured satire of a bored wealthy class, isn’t half as clever as it wants to be nor nearly as horrifying or entertaining as its clever premise suggests.

I was a big fan of Possessor, the haunting film Brendan Cronenberg released a few years ago, so I had high hopes for Infinity Pool. Bar an intriguing premise the picture offers very little to please horror fans alas, nor to fans of any other cinematic genre, for that matter.

Despite an overlong, rather rocky start Infinity Pool gets interesting around the half-hour mark, when you learn that a writer, wealthy by marriage and vacationing in a non-distinct faraway country, has the option of his clone being executed for a hit-and-run, instead of himself.

That definitely had my interest piqued ... for about 10 minutes at least, because Cronenberg is not really interested in the moral repercussions of that decision. Instead he morphs Infinity Pool into a predictable, tame satire of the one percent, that can be viewed as a perfect companion piece to last year's Triangle of Sadness (which I don't mean as a compliment).

The visual style hardly is innovative either, with trippy images of sex and violence that recall seventies wallpaper, while Alexander Skarsgard and Mia Goth blandly regurgitate their familiar acting schtick: cold and brooding for Skarsgard, shrill and unhinged for Goth.

In short: Infinity Pool feels like an inferior clone of themes and ideas that weren't that fresh to begin with.

release: 2023

director: Brandon Cronenberg

starring: Alexander Skarsgard, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Thomas Kretschmann