All inclusive resorts in tropical paradises are looked at as playgrounds for the rich and famous, but depending on where the resort is located, there can be a completely different world less than a mile away. One that can be filled with crime and poverty, so it makes for a sad reality. Also these places often have heightened security to keep their wealthy guests safe. Infinity Pool plays with this idea of safety within the resort, and it takes what are beautiful sights, and creates tension and makes the audience feel unsettled. The music is the key to this. There might be a bright beautiful landscape, but the music underneath is dark and ominous. It is like in The Shining, the overhead shot of the car driving up into the Rockies, but it has the dark undertones beneath due to the music, normally it would be captivating for its amazing looks, but instead all you can feel is dread, and that is what this movie encapsulates.
Infinity Pool starts out with a couple, James, Alexander Skarsgard, and Em at this all-inclusive resort. James is an author of one unsuccessful book, and he is looking for motivation for his second book, but nothing seems to be sparking his imagination, but he gets pleasantly surprised when Gabi, Mia Goth, comes up to him, and she says that she loves his book. So James and Gabi start to hang out, and they go on a double date for dinner at the resort, and the next day, despite it being against the rules, they leave the resort compound, and they go for a picnic by the water. They are drinking and eating all day, and James offers to drive the car back, but on the way back, he accidently hits and kills a local. They flee the scene, and the next day when James is arrested, he finds out that in the country they are staying, they believe in the eye for an eye punishment system, so he must give his life up, or they have a special option for the rich, they can make an excessive donation and be cloned, then the clone is killed instead. So James gets cloned, and the family of the guy who was hit by the car send a young boy to do the killing of James’s clone.
A wild start, but then it really starts to go off the rails. The couple that James had started hanging out with, had also been in a similar situation before, and so they had been cloned, and it turns out that they have a whole club of people, who had been cloned and had their clones killed. So James goes on a basic revenge mission with them, and they all get arrested again and cloned and killed. This habit starts to repeat itself, and initially James is into it, but then the group starts to turn on him, and James tries to escape, but they drag him back, and they make him stay until the end of the vacation season, and the resort closes down.
One of the mind-bending parts of the movie is the cloning process. So the visuals of it occurring are an assault on one’s visual senses. There is a lot of neon lights and flashing and sharp cuts and weird things happening. Then the person wakes up in a bed, so there is a period of time, when the government very well could have switched the bodies. So the clone could be the one that is actually going on to live the life, and the original could be the one being executed, but no one actually knows. It is brutal because there is a person who is dying, and clone or not, they have all the same feelings and memories as the original, and they feel pain, just like a normal person, but they get sacrificed because the person convicted of the crime is rich. It is inhumane, and also it seems futile to delve into it too much, because it is a looping thought process of if it matters if they were a clone or not, it hurts my brain.
This was also very heavy on the class division aspect. As previously mentioned, this took place on a resort, but they had to have heavy security set up for the resort, because the island was impoverished and had a large amount of crime. The main focus was on the rich people who were able to take advantage of the system, and it basically led to them being able to do whatever they wanted. They had the money, so every time they got arrested for a serious crime, they were able to just pay, get cloned, and then go back to wreaking havoc. They did not care that they were taking people’s lives on the island, they just cared that they could get out of it, something that the poorer people on the island did not have the luxury of doing.
So the movie reminded me a lot of The White Lotus, a TV show that takes place on a resort, and it is mainly about how unhappy these rich people are, and something tragic always happens at the end where one of the main characters dies. Infinity Pool took this concept, and then turned the volume all the way up until the knob broke, but they kept trying to find ways to turn it up louder, then they just decided to break the stereo and burn it all to the ground and do a ton of psychedelics.
Mia Goth, who really came to stardom last year, for her performances in X and Peral, two horror movies that became blockbusters. In both movies, she plays the main role, and in Peral, she gives one of if not the best monologues of the year for 2022, it is seven minutes long, and it is jam packed with emotion. In the movies, she starts out as being so likable, and as the movie goes on, she slowly becomes unhinged, more so in Peral than in X, but the same can be said for Infinity Pool. Initially she is very seductive to James’s character, and she slowly draws him into their world of crime. She is mysterious, but so alluring at the same time, almost irresistible, and then once he is hooked, she starts to act like she has lost her mind, and she does it so incredibly well.
She came out last week and criticized The Academy for the way in which they nominate people for the Oscars. She said that it is more about politicking, and that is less about the actual work in the project. This seems to be a true statement, her performance in Peral was amazing, but since it was a smaller budget horror film, it is going to be overlooked and unrewarded. I feel like the same could be said about Rebecca Hall’s performance in The Night House, where she basically single handedly put on an incredible show that was terrifying, and she got little to no recognition for it, because it was a smaller horror film. Mia Goth is incredible, and I am all in on any work she does from now on, she makes films a must see!
After I saw the movie, I listened to an interview with the director, Brandon Cronenberg. He is known for making very intense and gruesome films, and a big part of the interview came from a discussion about this film potentially being rated NC-17, but if a film gets rated NC-17, then it almost has a black mark, and movie theaters are way less likely to show the film. This led to him talking about his strong belief in there not being any censorship. After hearing this conversation, and seeing the movie, which is very gruesome, it has multiple orgis, and it has multiple drug sequences that lead to incredible psychedelic trips, he wants to put it all out there, and he does! It is also the second film in the past year that has featured an adult breast feeding scene, the other being Barbarian. It is so edgy, and it really draws out emotion.
Movies like this are what I live for, an idea so wild and out there, completely unique, and it is also beautifully shot. There are amazing views, and there are also incredibly trippy scenes soaked in neon and flash cuts that just keep moving, two very different formats, but both were done incredibly well. It was so fun to see this. Also watching Mia Goth transform as the movie progressed was enjoyable as well. This is a must-see movie, and I highly recommend it. It just mashes so many different cinematic things together in a fun way, and it is done in less than two hours. I gave this film 3.5 Stars, and it is my best and favorite movie of the year so far! (I am only at seven 2023 movies so far.)
Comments