“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”- F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy:”“My mouth is drinking from your pool of tearsI saw your heartbeat in the radium screenWhat does a body mean?”- Swans, “Where Does A Body End?”
Horror films share a lot of ground with fables, in the sense that they can provide some kind of lesson through vivid, sensational imagery. You don’t have to squint too hard to see the ostensible edification in the slasher-film clichés of the wanton, reckless teenagers who get bumped off and the virginal Final Girl who ends up being the lone survivor. But that’s not especially subtle. Far better, I think, are the moments when horror holds up a warped mirror to everyday life in a way that lays the monstrosity bare without passing too much overt judgment. Sort of like a modern version of Bosch’s satirical paintings. There’s a point, but it’s made through grotesque depiction, not blatant didacticism.
And in that respect, Infinity Pool is an excellent addition to this tradition. It’s a surreal fable about identity, morality, and the potential of wealth and privilege to distort both.
The film opens in disorienting fashion, the camera wheeling and careening through tranquil island landscapes, tumbling end over end before settling on a couple sitting at breakfast in what appears to be a resort. Everything is white and spotless, and the host is explaining that today marks the beginning of an important native festival, one celebrated before the beginning of the rainy season. He is flanked by the wait staff, all decked out in immaculate white suits and native masks that could generously be described as monstrous. It feels like there are nightmares standing right there in the middle of what otherwise looks like sleekly professional hospitality and nobody’s batting an eye.
The couple don’t look especially happy - there’s something of a malaise to them, that particular exhaustion that you feel in places that relentlessly exhort you to enjoy yourself. They’re James and Em Foster, vacationing at a resort on the island of La Tolqa in an effort to help James get his creative juices flowing again. He’s an author with one book and six years of writer’s block to his name. Em is his wife, and the daughter of his publisher, which seems to provide one explanation as to how he got published in the first place. His book didn’t really sell or garner much in the way of critical attention, and so now here he is, a mediocre author who married rich and who is acutely aware of both of those things. But soon enough, they meet Gabi and Alban Bauer, another couple staying at the resort. Alban’s a mostly-retired architect and Gabi is an actress. More to the point, Gabi read James’ book, and apparently loved it. She invites James and Em to dinner, and the two couples seem to hit it off. They have many drinks together, and Alban manages to bribe a resort employee to lend them his car and let them out of the resort, which is strictly forbidden. Well, one thing leads to another and James, the only one sober enough to drive back, gets careless on a dark back road, striking and killing a local farmer. Law enforcement finds out, and as it turns out, part of why people are prevented from leaving the resort is because La Tolqan culture is extremely strict, and most things -including this - are punishable by death.
But, the police officer tells them, they do have a special service for tourists. For a large sum of money, they will create a double of the accused, a perfect physical copy with all of their memories, to stand in for them at the execution. The law is satisfied without a paying guest having to die.
Alban and Gabi are very familiar with the procedure.
James agrees to go through with having a double made, and from there it’s a delirious, hellish plunge down the rabbit hole of identity and consciousness - if there’s more than one of you, which is actually you? Physically identical, with all the same memories and experiences, can you ever be sure of which one is the “real” you and which one is the double? And if the only thing standing between you and making another you to pay for your crimes is money, what happens when you have far more than enough money? The process becomes recreation, as well as license to never take responsibility for your actions, not when you can make another you to bear all the punishment like some kind of sin-eater, or like the poor young men who were hired by wealthy families to take their son’s place in military drafts. And it’s not just a body, it’s a body with memories and consciousness, something functionally identical to a human being purpose-built to die. Whose life is it? Is it any less the double’s? What differentiates James from his double? The distinctions begin to blur.
And from this ability to pay on demand for someone else to die in your place emerges an examination of the idea of vacation as license to suspend morality, the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” writ large. In some ways, it’s a more highbrow take on Hostel’s examination of spring break culture and the way economies are built around the satisfaction of appetites, with a more existential bent to it. It’s bad enough when tourists from the U.S. travel abroad and expect their laws and freedoms to come with them, but here we have tourists in a cloistered environment designed to serve them deciding that nobody's laws apply to them. And like any colonial tourism situation, corrupt law enforcement benefits at the expense of the populace. After awhile, depravity becomes another pastime, as sequences of delirious violence and hallucinatory sex cut immediately to next-day mundanity, as if this is all just normal vacation behavior. Leave a trail of ruined property, bodies and psyches and leave someone else - or, rather, another you - to deal with the bill, and go back to your normal, polite lives. It’s easy if you don’t have a soul. At the end of the day, wealth is the best medicine: It anesthetizes you to suffering, and immunizes you from consequences.
The whole thing is told with an impeccable visual sense. The resort is full of bright, saturated colors (as are a number of hallucinatory sequences, suggesting that neither are real life) and everything is polished to gleaming, while the world outside of the resort is drab stone, wood, rust and poverty. The native language looks more like ideograms than anything else, and the absence of the Latin alphabet, along with the bizarre masks in the beginning, emphasize a sense of the local culture as utterly alien, as though we’re seeing them through the eyes of the tourists. There are two worlds here, divided by high fences topped with razor wire and guarded gates. By the end of the film, it seems like it’s as much to protect the natives from the tourists as the reverse. There’s almost no music, just enough to emphasize tense moments, and the performances are slightly chilly, the dialogue tending toward speeches, but it works because it underscores how unnatural all of this is. And the technology used to create the doubles is sort of grungy and low-tech, lots of technicians taking measurements, sharp electrical arcs and thick red paste in a tile room that looks like a shower. There’s nothing futuristic about it, it has the grubby functionality of any decently maintained industrial machinery.
Director Brandon Cronenberg’s films have been, right from jump, explorations of identity, body, and power structures told as unapologetically violent fables, and this is no different. But with each film it feels like he’s growing more and more into his own - he’s never plagiarized his father’s work, it’s always been his own spin on similar ideas, but between this and Possessor, his own distinct vision really seems to be taking shape and I can’t wait to see where he goes from here.
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