Top 15 Movies of 2023: No. 4 - Infinity Pool

4. Infinity Pool, dir. Brandon Cronenberg

Are these lists getting too tasteful? All these important movies with deep commentaries, and only one horror movie so far. Way too many Best Picture nominees in the Top 15. What am I, Barrack Obama here?

Anyway, here's the nastiest movie I saw in 2023, Infinity Pool. Obama would never put this on any list, unless he wanted to bomb it.

Infinity Pool starts off as a pretty broad commentary on the shittiness of tourism as cultural exploitation. Then it just keeps going with that thought all the way until it is a nightmare of excess and hedonism. Just when you think this movie has truly gone off the rails and lost whatever point it was making, it keeps going into another level of Hell. Maybe that initial point never mattered at all. Instead Infinity Pool returns to a running theme in Brandon Cronenberg's work, the destruction of the self. His previous film, Possessor was an equally brutal and unrelenting movie, that time how violence leads to the annihilation of identity. Infinity Pool is like the SciFi Spring Breakers, a party that never stops until you're completely hollowed out, a husk of what you once were.

We open with frustrated novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman) on vacation in a non-existent place called Li Tolqa. Other than Infinity Pool being shot around a lovely stretch of Croatia's coastline, the concept of Li Tolqa is that it is no place. "Li Tolqa" sounds like a mixture of Chinese and Romance languages, linguistically nonsensical. The resort staff offer every kind of international cuisine and belly dances. It is a nation of exoticization, without a history and only here to serve the whims of rich foreigners. The only thing the Li Tolqa people have is a local festival where they wear these horrible, very upsetting masks. We see the resort is a heavily-guarded compound, much like several third world resorts. You can take cruises to Haiti right now and see barbed wire ringing your beaches. But the resort is just the first layer of the exploitation Cronenberg Jr. has imagined for us. Really the entire country is a playground for your pleasures.

At first, it seems like Li Tolqa has an extreme and unusual form of justice. James meets Gabi (Mia Goth, an ever-reliable scream queen), a fellow tourist and the rare fan of his writing. She leads him out of the resort and into increasing danger. After a drunken hit and run, James is dragged off by the police. He then gets to watch the murder of his own clone, a scapegoat for his sins. Turns out, this is a new expensive titillation, a suicide by proxy, an eroticism of self-annihilation. Em is on the first flight home, James is on the wild adventure with Gabi into new and more depraved forms of pleasure. Quickly he learns that tanks to the cloning, laws effectively do not exist. All lives are just another consumptive thrill. And I'll admit, Mia Goth is on another level of sexy intensity here versus even her great performances last year in X and Pearl. She could lead anybody down some very dark places.

Except eventually hits there limit. When everything is a joke, every person is just a thing to be exploited, where does the exploitation end? Well, it doesn't. There are no safe words in Li Tolqa. This is going to end very badly for James.

Infinity Pool can compete well with Ari Aster's Beau is Afraid in being a movie all about the utter decimation of its protagonist, top to bottom, in complete humiliation. (Personally, I like this one a lot better.) Infinity Pool goes way more extreme into orgies and terror and B. Cronenberg's increasingly beautiful and surreal hallucinations. He has a very unique vision of horror, distinct from the Elder Cronenberg. 

I have to admire how hardcore this movie goes. You have Mia Goth just shrieking at the end, in full monster-mode, doing all she can to tear the world down for a gag.  Infinity Pool starts with a weak nagging of the privileged, to open the door to an utterly sadist fantasy. Infinity Pool is gratuitous to the point that the snake eats its own tail. Let us all enjoy our fetishes on our way down to oblivion.