You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Review of Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool from Josh Pearce

Infinity Pool, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, is a failure. Sure, it has a premier cast. The film is visually engaging, with interesting Croatian locations, the kind of vivid colors found in Argento’s Suspiria or Cosmatos’s Mandy, and a proper amount of squick and WTF moments. And it did perform better at the box office than the director’s father’s latest release. In the end, though the film is probably trying to make a point about something, it gets distracted by a bunch of drug orgies instead of examining its premise.

We start with struggling author James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) on vacation in the fictional country of Li Tolqa. He and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) meet another tourist couple, Gabi and Alban Bauer (Mia Goth and Jalil Lespert), who entice them on a daytrip, even though guests are not permitted to leave the gated resort.

After nightfall, James drunkenly drives the group back to the hotel and accidentally hits, and kills, a local farmer. This is where we depart from reality. All four tourists are arrested but only James, as the driver, is charged with a crime. After some cursory questioning (without benefit of counsel or any mention of contacting an embassy), he “confesses” and is judged guilty (without benefit of a trial). The sentence for such is to allow the victim’s eldest son an honor killing. In cases where there are no sons, the state takes on that duty.

Fortunately for James, there’s a loophole. In exchange for a monetary contribution, the state will clone him, complete with all his memories, and this duplicate will be put to death instead. James is led to an ATM. Honor is restored, tourism remains uninterrupted, foreign nationals are only mildly inconvenienced.

At this point, nothing in Infinity Pool can be taken at face value: the point is not that a developing nation has magical cloning technology, or that their main application of it seems to be extorting money from tourists. The setup is now in place to interrogate socioeconomic injustices with a biting, Vonnegut-style satire. There is a resemblance to the fictional San Lorenzo setting from Cat’s Cradle, as well as an onsite Chinese restaurant offering a “multicultural dining experience.” Gabi’s career as an actress, hired solely to “fail naturally” in commercials, seems like a commentary on useless contributions to society.

We could easily imagine this as a classic Star Trek ethical dilemma: A crew member on shore leave would (likely inadvertently) break some obscure local law, and be sentenced to have their clone put to death, all before the first commercial break. The rest of the episode would be an hour of everyone debating how to respect other cultures, protecting the safety of their crew, the legal rights of clones, the nature of suffering, and ideas of justice all at the same time, and then would resolve with them finding a way to talk their way out of the situation to the satisfaction of all parties involved.

This movie does none of that. The execution happens very quickly, without a word of protest from the onlookers. The remainder of the runtime deals with its aftermath. James learns that Gabi and Alban not only knew about Li Tolqa’s unique justice system, but have both been through it before, and that they return to the country year after year with a group of thrill-seeking friends, like macabre snowbirds. One of these friends raises the question, “How do you know they killed the right copy?” like Hugh Jackman asking (in The Prestige), “Would I be the man in the box or the prestige?” Certainly something to consider: Does killing an exact duplicate of a criminal (or killing the criminal and letting a copy live) actually mean that justice is served?

With this corrupt system, rich people can just hunt the locals for sport. How far up the food chain would they have to target before society stopped tolerating their behavior? James and co. devolve into juvenile Clockwork Orange anarchists, paying off the police with every murder, cheering the spectacle of their own executions like a sporting event. Without accountability to society, they become animals.

Infinity Pool seems to posit that with each cloning, the tourists become even more depraved. This is similar to the concept of model collapse, or compression artifacts. Copy errors arise because vital information is missing with each iteration. The duplicate is never as complete as the original. In these tourists, call that vital information a soul, or a conscience.

Even before he is cloned, James appears robotic. To Em, the most disturbing part is not the initial execution, it is James’s lack of reaction to it. If the film is trying to present him as a sympathetic or relatable protagonist, corrupted by association with callous rich people, then it also fails at this. Although he isn’t rich himself, he isn’t an innocent victim of circumstance, either. He chooses to drive drunk, is willing to use Em’s money to bribe his way out of trouble (in effect, to be complicit in the corruption), and to use her credit card to extend his stay at the resort. He deceives his wife in order to remain in Li Tolqa and release the worst impulses that already live inside him, all in the supposed service of breaking his writer’s block. The trope of frustrated artist who must transgress in order to work is so eye-rollingly self-indulgent that we’re already rooting against him from scene one.

Li Tolqa is also set up as a strawman. Gabi repeatedly refers to its citizens as “barbaric” and “animals,” echoing racist, colonialist language. Given what we see of its government, it’s hard to argue that this brutal police state is worth respecting, or preserving. But, of course, why is it a police state? How much of those tourist ATM withdrawals do you think are going to public services or victim reparations?

And James is complicit in this by staying at the resort in the first place. This may be the actual takeaway from the entire plot — even a non-rich, “average” Western interloper does great harm when treating another country like a playground, and its inhabitants like servants. A lot of recent entertainment media focuses on affluent travel — The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness, the many iterations of Below Deck — but their messages, if any, stop at, “Wow, rich people really suck.” Subtext: “And that’s just the way it is.”

Do we really need that kind of paralyzing fatalism in our fiction when examples like Matthew Broderick’s car crash in Northern Ireland and Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing efforts to buy up ancestral Hawaiian land (and evict current tenants, and block access to public beaches) underline it in the real world? In Infinity Pool, James (like the ultra-rich) is given a sense of the freedom to do whatever he wishes, without consequence. That’s certainly common fantasy fulfillment, and perhaps Cronenberg’s message is that that kind of freedom ultimately separates a person from humanity.

The all-inclusive resorts of the type seen in these movies are selling a taste of that freedom. Anywhere with an underperforming currency, tourists descend upon the land like they own it, and boss the locals around like they own them.

The ethics of international travel in a time of fossil fuel-driven climate change and global pandemic are already questionable. Add overtourism in Europe and Hawaii, and it becomes hard to justify at all. Resorts like Disney’s Aulani — repackaging a native population’s own history and stories into cartoons, literally turning their land into a playground — seem particularly obscene. Fun for the whole family.  We may not all be ultra-rich, but comparatively….

The linked CNN article about tourism in Hawaii says, “all responsibility as a good guest seems to disappear with the handing over of money,” and quotes Hōkūlani Aikau, co-editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i:

“It’s the idea that they’re on vacation, they’ve spent a lot of money to get there, and they should have access to whatever they want. And when they don’t get it, then it becomes the natives’ fault for not delivering on the promise, even though they weren’t the ones making the promise in the first place.”

We’re never going to change rich people’s behavior so long as the world reinforces their belief that throwing enough money at a problem will make it go away. (But we can change something.)

James doesn’t change. He doesn’t board the plane with the rest of the guests at the end of his stay (or did he send a clone on the plane to rejoin his wife? Or did he get on the plane and leave a clone behind?), and the movie closes with him sitting alone in the resort, much in the same place we first saw him. He had a bad trip, but that hasn’t seemed to affect him much. He certainly hasn’t gotten over his writer’s block; if the film had ended on James writing again, then we could view it all as an exercise in artistic suffering and toxicity.

As the camera pans across the airport departures terminal, there is a quick glimpse of several people dressed up as antisemitic stereotypes, complete with traditional outfits, sidelocks, and exaggerated prosthetic noses. Nothing in the movie explains this. Cronenberg is Jewish — so is this some kind of coded message, or is it a mockery of antisemites, like the “Running of the Jew” in Borat? What are we to make of this, in a movie about rich people performing secret, violent rituals?

An ambiguous message is fine, against the backdrop of an otherwise coherent plot. Cronenberg writes no good guys, no redeeming message, no clear thesis nor any antithesis, and neither society is presented in a flattering light. Infinity Pool offers an idea, but then fails to follow through. But maybe we’re looking too hard, and what’s on screen is just the way it is.