Infinity Pool

Director: Brandon Cronenberg (Canada, Croatia, Hungary). Year of Release: 2023

Darkness. A couple is talking in that “just woken up” whisper that sounds louder than if they were shouting. Finally, she opens the curtains to reveal a luxury hotel room. She wants to get down to breakfast so she doesn’t miss the omelette maker. James and Em are in the fictional resort of La Tolqa. He’s a writer who never managed to follow up his debut novel 6 years ago, but, no matter, she’s a publishing heiress who can afford to pick up the tab.

La Tolqa is the resort equivalent of a gated community – the entrance is covered in barbed wire and holiday makers are banned from leaving the compound. There is a fake city close by, full of fake shops and a fake Chinese restaurant. The hotel organises fake boat trips to local islands. For the rest of the day, they are free to sunbathe on the beach. In an early scene, a local drives onto their private beach willfully destroying as much as he can as the tourists look on astounded.

James and Em meet another couple, Alban and Gabi. Alban is – oh, I wasn’t really paying attention. An architect turned website owner maybe? All we need to know is that he’s Swiss and rich. Gabi is an actor who specializes in adverts playing the woman who is so dumb and useless that she needs whatever worthless product they’re selling. She is also pretty and speaks in a girly voice. When she suggests going to the fake restaurant that James had previously disdained, he’s there in an instant.

Gabi and Alban hustle a car which takes the four of them away from the resort. After a day on the beach, where James goes for a piss and Gabi wanks him off, as you do, James drives them home. Just as his headlights aren’t working properly, a local farmer walks in front of the car, and is mown down. They drive off without reporting the death as “this is a strange country where if you go to the police station you’ll be raped in the night”. The next day, the police come calling.

We know pretty much all of this already, as it’s mainly in the trailer. Here’s what happens next. The police tell them that the local penalty for any killing, including accidents, is to be killed by the victim’s eldest son. But never mind, there’s a special law for tourists with enough bribe money. In La Tolqa they’ve somehow developed the technology of cloning people, so if you give the police a big enough back hander, they create a Doppelgänger, which is executed in your stead.

There are a few things they need saying here. Firstly, this is a film which expects you to take a lot of things as read (something which annoys me about much science fiction as, if this can be true, anything can be true). But I was able to go with this, for a while at least. There was no attempt to explain just how this Doppelgänger thing works, but I presumed that it was being used to expose a more profound truth (it wasn’t, but at least there was still potential at this stage).

Secondly, and something which has been picked up by just about every review of Infinity Pool that I’ve read. After James has watched his Doppelgänger been executed, everyone asks him how he knows his double was killed and not him? This is presented as a great Philosophical moral quandary. Well, I’m sorry if it sounds pretentious, but those critics need to read Descartes mote closely. And I’d rather be pretentious than see profundity in this artificial vacuous dilemma.

Finally, for the time being, Infinity Pool displays a terrible Orientalism (or, seeing as it’s uncliear where La Tolqa is supposed to be – possible Eastern Europe – an equivalent treatment of anywhere outside the Global North). The police are corrupt rapists (in a way the “our” police are not – tell that one to Sarah Everard), the locals are envious of “our” wealth, this is not a safe place for “civilised” people to be out at night, or, indeed, during the day.

To an extent, you can argue that this Orientalism does not belong to the film, but to its pampered, privileged main characters. They don’t notice the people who create their exotic meals or clean out their rooms. Maybe the police are just on the take when it comes to making extra money from privileged tourists. Well, maybe, but it’s nothing I’d put money on. And I don’t really want to be asked to take sides between cops and yuppies.

Infinity Pool seems to presume that to make good anti-capitalist satire, all you need to do is show the rich misbehaving. This follows a number of recent films, of which Triangle of Sadness is merely the most egregious. And yet we are given no alternative point of view. I guess James is supposed to be our representative, because he married into his money and is not quite as bad as the rest. But he is vain and shallow, and gives no impression that he ever worked a day in his life.

Watching Infinity Pool I found myself continually asking, where are the workers? There are occasional walk on parts for maids or farmers, but none of them is portrayed as a living, breathing, human being. We only see what is happening through the point of view of privileged wastrels. Maybe we’re supposed to hate all of them – I certainly hope that we are – but frankly, I think time spent in any of their company could have been better spent elsewhere.

I stuck with the film for the first hour. I didn’t think it was superb, but it did have potential and some of the characters looked like they might be interesting. Maybe the fact that James’s haircut made him look like a more buff Keir Starmer diverted me into enjoying his physical humiliation. But as I realised we weren’t going anywhere, it just became tiresome. And I won’t even mention the scene towards the end with Hasidic Jews with exaggerated features that was just plain offensive.

At one stage, we hear a review of James’s only book, saying it was pretentious and dreary. This was the film’s true pot-kettle moment. If only it had the self-awareness to realise it.