Luxury holidays don’t come any grislier than the one endured by James (Alexander Skarsgärd), and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) in Brandon Cronenberg’s luridly enjoyable new horror picture, Infinity Pool. James and Em are vacationing in a hotel compound in Li Tolqa, a corrupt and violent tropical state. James is a struggling author with one book to his name. He’s hoping the holiday may cure his writer’s block. His wife is the one with the money. At the resort, they’re befriended by another couple, the flirtatious Gabi (Mia Goth) – who claims to be a fan of James’s work – and her charming but shifty husband Alban (Jalil Lespert). When the two couples venture out of the heavily fortified hotel complex, alcohol, sex and bad driving combine to put James in a very sticky situation.
Cronenberg shares his father David’s fascination with violence, bodily fluids and doppelgängers. As in old Luis Buñuel surrealist satires about wealthy guests at dinner parties that never end, the characters here are trapped in a gilded, nightmarish world they can’t escape. The local authorities have a novel way of dealing with rich tourists who misbehave… they get the victims’ families to execute them. There is a way out, though. Those able to pay “a significant sum” are allowed to create cloned versions of themselves. Wealthy tourists can therefore sit in the public gallery and watch their own deaths.
