Review of Infinity Pool (2023) by Hnestlyonthesly — 22 May 2023

Infinity Pool makes for a delightful date night that new and old couples alike can enjoy.

It’s been hard to think about how to assemble anything cohesive about Infinity Pool in the week since I saw it. I went in with expectations that it was going to be a horror film, I think because I had hurriedly read Cronenberg’s name on the screen as the trailer flashed but without recognizing that it was a nepobaby Cronenberg instead of the OG Cronenberg. So discovering, albeit slowly, that Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård were going to star in a delightfully weird, sometimes sexy meditation on wealth and its excesses with nary a jump scare in sight was a pleasant surprise. (Note: I just realized from reading this listicle arguing that Goth is the best modern scream queen that she was in one of my formative indie movies as a young adult, The Survivalist!).

The plot unspools slowly but expertly in IP. We have enough time to appreciate that his marriage is on the rocks, that he has some self-confidence issues, despite being Alexander Skarsgård hot, but that’s think about Alexander, right? He’s the one who’s so hot that he can literally play himself as a sex fiend devoted to Van in Season 3 of Atlanta without skipping a beat.

Mia Goth finds some positively iconic moments in her early meet cute and her character’s climactic appearance astride the top of a lux car eating from a bucket of fried chicken while hurling oddly specific and insanely meta insults is worth the price of admission.

Cronenberg fluidly and thoroughly turns over the manifold permutations of the potential outcomes of his characters’ interactions with the central game of his movie. I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just say that there are so many deliciously unexpected moments twined into that metaphor: James Foster’s reaction at the execution, the exploration of lives without consequence, the repeated and yet shocking surprise twists that tumble into dark humor, the lampooning of fragile masculinity and the fragile ego of the writer.

On a personal note, Friends came with almost entirely opposite reactions to the central metaphor/magical engine of the film, which made it even more pleasant to talk through the ways in which it validated my own fears about trusting or not trusting others with shameful information when in desperate need of uncritical help. It was the perfect kind of weird that I think Wife would’ve really enjoyed back in the old days of not constantly Castor and Polluxing ourselves on behalf of our young ward.