Editor's Note: The following article includes minor spoilers for the film Infinity Pool.
When Brandon Cronenberg first burst onto the scene with his studiously creepy debut Antiviral, it was an arrival that was met with, shall we say, expectations in certain circles. Brandon is, among other things, the son of David Cronenberg: the legendary baron of body horror responsible for landmarks of that aforementioned subgenre such The Fly, Dead Ringers, Scanners, and others. Yet, even something like the unsettling and entrancing 10-minute short "Please Speak Continuously And Describe Your Experiences As They Come To You" announced the younger Cronenberg as a filmmaker equipped with a notably different approach from that of his father.
Reflecting on Antiviral, it was clear even then that Brandon was sharing in his father's established cinematic vernacular of choice. After all, the two share the same overriding interest in sterile, uncontaminated corporate interiors; sex as liberation; and the viscous, gooey, gross factor of what happens when a human body, that weakest of machines, fails itself. More punitive critics might accuse Brandon Cronenberg of coasting on the considerable influence of his father’s legacy without adding anything really new to it, though we should be clear that this is not only an inaccurate take, but wholly reductive.
In other words, Brandon Cronenberg is ferociously gifted, completely singular, and here to stay. Antiviralwas an astonishing debut, forecasting the coming gloom of something like the COVID-19 pandemic to a degree that no one could have predicted when the film initially hit the festival circuit back in 2012. Possessor, Cronenberg’s ickier, more visceral follow-up, was one of the most memorable and repulsive motion pictures to be released in 2020, proving that Antiviral was no fluke. Like his father, the younger Cronenberg exhibits an unapologetically fetishistic interest in the ways in which the old and the new flesh overlap. His work is not for the squeamish, but with only three features under his belt, Brandon Cronenberg has established himself as one of the more exciting stylists working in genre cinema today. In so many ways, he is the only person who could ever carry his father's torch.
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Then again, is Brandon Cronenberg even interested in carrying his father's torch? Undeniably, he has inherited specific thematic interests, not to mention the presumptions that come with bearing a certain family name. Infinity Pool, which affords Brandon his most expansive canvas to date, is even more cruel, transgressive, and button-pushing than either Possessor or the relatively restrained Antiviral: it’s a black-hearted, venomously hypnotic feast of degradation, strobe-lit orgies, horrifying ritualistic masks, and anatomically imaginative carnage. What we have here is a film that seems designed to send anyone who was on the fence about either of this director’s two previous pictures sprinting for the exit aisles in search of barf bags. Infinity Pool is everything you would hope for and expect from a film emblazoned with the Cronenberg family name – and yet, as we hope to elucidate in the coming paragraphs, it is also much more than that, to a degree that it will hopefully cement the younger Cronenberg as more than just his father’s heir apparent.
If David Cronenberg’s films have grown more cerebral and contemplative with time (see: last year’s Crimes of the Future, which is almost mellow by the standards of the guy who gave the world Naked Lunch), there is an outwardly aggressive, immersively tactile filmmaking energy in his son’s work that is never anything less than a thrill to behold. If Antiviral was partly about how sickness estranges us from both our bodies and our minds, and Possessor fixated on the complications of inhabiting a psyche other than our own, Infinity Pool concerns itself with the disquieting autonomy that comes from crossing the line that separates 90% of humanity from the depraved and the demented, the loathsomely privileged and the utterly psychopathic. It’s a film that’s so bracing in its perversions that it both feels completely natural that a member of the Cronenberg family directed it and like nothing the elder Cronenberg could have made on his own.
Brandon is working with arguably his starriest cast to date here, and to be sure, the performances that he gets out of stars Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth are raw, animalistic, frightening, and exquisite to behold. Skarsgård, sticking to his winning streak of working with weird, boundary-pushing auteurs like Robert Eggers and Jeremy Saulnier, plays James Foster. James is a mediocre novelist who wrote one poorly reviewed book six years before Infinity Pool begins and has yet to manufacture a follow-up. It should also be mentioned that James married into money when he met the loving, seemingly adjusted Em (Cleopatra Coleman). The two are vacationing on the remote, fictional island of Li Tolqa when first we meet them, where the couple's lush, first-class surroundings are envisioned with a disturbing, chilly undertow.
Why, for instance, is the luxe resort where James and Em are staying essentially a fortified compound, patrolled at night by fearsome armed guards? Why do we, the viewer, feel a lurch in our stomach in the movie’s earliest scenes, long before anything truly appalling has transpired? Such is the younger Cronenberg’s innate mastery of tone – like his father, the guy never wants his audience to get too comfortable. Something seems amiss even in the opening scenes of Infinity Pool, though we, the audience, have no idea how terrible things are about to get for the characters.
One night, Skarsgård gets a much-needed ego boost from a strange, wide-eyed young woman named Gabi (Goth, of course, who does more than just massage James’ ego in one of the movie’s more shockingly candid moments). Following a hedonistic night of drunken revelry, the inebriated James gets behind the wheel of a car and ends up striking and killing a local farmer on a secluded country road. Immediately guilt-stricken, the pampered, spiritually impotent James makes it known that he wishes to notify the authorities. This is a bad idea, insists the increasingly maniacal-seeming Gabi, since Li Tolqa is supposedly a barbaric, brutally conservative country has a zero-tolerance policy for violent crime. The smart thing for everyone in the group to do, she insists, is stay silent, carry on, and pretend as though this horrible incident simply never happened.
Of course, the Li Tolqa police do eventually show up at James’ door the next day, confronting him with a deadly and unthinkable proposition: he can either be sentenced to death for his misdeeds, or, since he’s rich, James can have a clone of himself manufactured for the sole purposes of being sent in for execution. The only caveat? James has to watch himself die. This is a witty metaphor for the concept of ego death, and when James 1.0 dies, the character adopts a sinister new lease on life. This is only one of the many vicious spectacles to behold in Infinity Pool, which dials up the crazy more than a few notches when James discovers that, since his soul has already expired, he can now indulge in whatever demeaning and/or degrading fantasies his rotten heart desires (home invasions or adult breastfeeding, take your pick).
One of the more pressing questions posed by Cronenberg’s tough-minded screenplay is whether or not this lethal ultimatum we've just described is what forces the otherwise mild-mannered James to abandon whatever scruples he might have once possessed, or whether Gabi’s sadistic goading and affinity for emasculation and humiliation (wait until you've seen the guy who starred in The Northman being walked around like a dog on a leash) simply brings out a savagery that was lurking beneath the man's handsome veneer this entire time. Many have rightly pointed out that Infinity Pool is ultimately a class allegory; it’s become borderline fashionable declare that the film is “The White Lotus on [insert hallucinogenic drug of choice].” One could superficially compare the film to any of the recent slate of island-bound class critiques (a group that includes The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery), although this writer is of the opinion that Infinity Pool trumps them all, both as a sensory experience and as a lampoon of wealth and disaffection.
This is one area where the younger Cronenberg’s interests diverge distinctly from that of his father: Infinity Pool is, at the end of the day, a movie about how affluence enables you to behave in any horrible, dehumanizing way you wish to, and while David Cronenberg’s cinema has always been more casually observant in its politics than many who would simply throw the term “body horror” at his filmography would ever be willing to admit, he’s never confronted class consciousness to the utterly upfront degree that his son does in his latest and most assured film to date.
While it’s not difficult to see how being raised in part by the man who gave the world Crash(1996)would inform one’s own creative sensibility, we’re here to argue that it’s high time we started appreciating Brandon Cronenberg as his own artist, and not simply as David Cronenberg’s son. David Cronenberg doesn’t seem interested in the confrontational edge and gross-out factor of his son’s output (one could argue he's been there, and done that), just as Brandon Cronenberg is too young, hungry, and brilliant to be making a film like Crimes of the Future, which feels like a satirical creative manifesto from one of our dark elder statesmen. No one else but Brandon Cronenberg could make a film like Infinity Pool. The best part? It feels like he's only getting started.
