By Michael Marano

In Infinity Pool, people who are dead inside essentially play with their own corpses as shiny, new toys. The savagery of that idea is, simply, delicious.

Infinity Pool, directed by Brandon Cronenberg. Screening at the Somerville Theater, AMC Assembly Row 12 and other cinemas in New England.

A scene from Infinity Pool in which Alexander Skarsgård is not having a good day at the resort spa.

If only he weren’t so damned Cronenberg-y.

I really want to assess Brandon Cronenberg’s work independently from that of his dad, David Cronenberg. I mean, if Sofia Coppola made a multi-generational Mafia saga, by default, we’d have to look at it through the lens of her dad’s The Godfather, right? If Rob Reiner made a sequel to The Jerk, if Nick Cassavetes had cast Peter Falk as the lead in The Notebook, if Panos Cosmatos were signed to make the next Rambo movie, the comparisons with their dads’ work would come of necessity.

Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool could easily take place down the street from the setting of his dad’s most recent movie, Crimes of the Future. For that matter, Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral and Possessor could have taken place in the Toronto of David Cronenberg’s The Brood and Videodrome.

David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, with its Interzone-like setting, was a better William S. Burroughs film than was his Naked Lunch. And Crimes of the Future, with its bourgeois, colonialist decay, was a better J.G. Ballard film than his Crash was. Similarly, Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool is a meditation on Burroughs and Ballard.

Or maybe it’s a meditation on his dad’s meditations on Burroughs and Ballard?

Or a continuation of it?

So much so, that it’s hard to not see Crimes of the Future and Infinity Pool as a diptych.

Don’t get me wrong, Infinity Pool is a fine and glorious piece of body horror art in and of itself. But I can’t extract it from the Cronenberg-i-ness of the dad’s work, right down to the fact that Infinity Pool‘s lead, Alexander Skarsgård, has the same damned haircut Viggo Mortensen has sported in a few David Cronenberg flicks.

Infinity Pool is set in a resort in the fictitious third world country of Li Tolqa that’s equal parts White Lotus and a CIA Black Site. The movie is of a genre that I like to call “Food Network for the Revolution,” because it, like recent releases such as The Menu, Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, US, Get Out and the aforementioned White Lotus, whets our appetite to eventually Eat the Rich. Infinity Pool is, of course, satiric in nature, because wealth inequality in this world that Capitalism has created is, objectively, absurd to depict in any manner. But above the absurdity and satire, Infinity Pool is a work of grotesquerie… an exaggeration of social reality to the point of surreal hideousness. It’s a comedy of manners for our world of rule by the 1%, in which manners are an impossibility among the mega-wealthy.

Skarsgård plays James Foster, a shitty novelist with only one book to his name who goes to the Li Tolqa resort “to find inspiration,” a fool’s errand in the Club Med-like compound, beyond the gates of which no guest is supposed to venture. Foster and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman), encounter Gabi (the terrifyingly good Mia Goth), an actress for commercials who’s a “genius at failure,” that is, she’s brilliant at playing people who can’t do anything without the aid of the miraculous products her commercials are hawking. She demonstrates this skill hilariously in a Chinese restaurant run and populated by Li Tolqans in Mandarin garb, showing how she sells consumerism in a colonialist setting where the colonized are themselves indulging in Orientalism.

Gabi and her hubby Alban (Jalil Lespert) are of a group that are the same kind of besotted jet-setters that appear in Ballard’s takes on the citizens of the declining British Empire, such as High-Rise, Crash, Concrete Island, Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes. They’re like the shits in Burroughs’ works, fucking around with guns in third-world countries in ways that are just a few degrees away from playing William Tell (with a firearm) while ingesting Yage-like narcotics. Toss in thematic tips of the hat to Night of the Iguana and Suddenly, Last Summer, and you’ve got tourists crossing paths with the Li Tolqan cops, whose uniforms all look like Benito Mussolini’s parade garb.

I can’t bear the thought of spoiling this conceit, but it’s at this point that Infinity Pool takes the notions of touristic consumerism to a brilliant place, one that entails the consumerists consuming the one thing they have yet to consume: themselves (and no, I do not mean in a cannibalistic way). These people who are dead inside essentially play with their own corpses as shiny, new toys. The savagery of that idea is, simply, delicious.

I mentioned earlier the impossibility of considering Brandon Cronenberg’s work separately from that of his dad, David Cronenberg. Still, over the course of writing this review I’ve started to see how one can do that. David Cronenberg’s give-and-take with Ballard (going back to They Came from Within/Shivers) and with Burroughs (going back to Scanners) inspired his own creative endeavors. So is Brandon Cronenberg’s dialogue with his dad’s work. Embracing and shedding a powerful influence can lead to an artist honing his or her or their identity. Of course, the characters in Infinity Pool lack selves to assert. David Cronenberg defined himself as an artist through the dialogues he had with others. So is Brandon Cronenberg. That he could do so with Infinity Pool, a ferocious and brilliant and nastily insightful piece of work, is something any dad would be proud of.

Novelist, writing coach, editor and film critic Michael Marano was first made aware of David Cronenberg through issues of Fangoria, and is still miffed at Roger Ebert for listing The Brood as one of his “Dogs of the Week.”