Review--Infinity Pool--Brandon Cronenberg (2023)

It's hard to feel sorry for James (Alexander Skarsgard) in Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg, 2023)

I really loved Brandon Cronenberg's last film Possessor (2020), so a new film starring Alexander Skarsgard and Mia Goth was high on my list.  I was only slightly disappointed by the film, but as a visually arresting spectacle, it was a trippy and provocative experience.  Like Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018), the film has some fun drug trip representations, which places it's narrative in that liminal space between waking and sleeping, real and fantasy.  The story is fairly straightforward, but the soundtrack, visuals, and "message" combine to create truly unique cinema.  This film may not be for everyone, but I dug it!!

Infinity Pool starts in media res as James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) wake up in their hotel room at a posh resort in Li Tolqa, a fictional place that was filmed in Sibenik, Croatia, with some scenes shot in Hungary.  They go to grab some breakfast and James soon encounters a fan of his book, Gabi (Mia Goth), and her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert).  For context, James is a "one book" novelist basically kept by his rich wife, and his one book was published by her father.  He and Em have come to Li Tolqa for "inspiration" since he's had writer's block for years.  To actually find someone who has read and LIKED James's book stokes his wounded ego, and he and Em decide to hang out with the other couple...to their detriment.  They go to the beach, and...let's just say Gabi gets handsy on the beach, and James does not say no.  Ugh.  He's already such a loser.

     James and Em decide to hang out in the afternoon with Gabi and Alban outside the resort

Of course, everyone gets too drunk to drive, and James gives it a go, but with the car's electrical system failing, he hits someone driving back to the resort.  Gabi and Alban insist that they should not call the police.  Nevertheless, James and Em are roused out of bed by the police and taken to the station to sort this mess out.  As the trailer gives away, SPOILER, Li Tolqa has some very unique rules, including tourists not leaving the resort compound.  If you commit a crime, the punishment is EXECUTION! Yes! I think I would have done my homework before vacationing in this place, but just like everywhere, if you're rich, there's a workaround for that.  As Thresh (Thomas Kretschmann), the head of the police,  explains to the couple once they admit what happened, if you pay enough money, you can have a double made--someone identical to you.  Don't get too hung up on the process by which this happens in this so-called poor country--it's the film's conceit, but an important one.  James gets smothered in red goo, and then he wakes to find out there's another one of him, identical in every way.

                                              James prepares to be cloned or doubled

Once the double is made, the eldest born son of the person who was killed must murder the criminal that did the deed, or its double, while the OG criminal (maybe) must watch himself be stabbed to death.  Pretty sick.  Once that experience is over, Em wisely wants to get the fu** out of there, but James's passport is missing, so he cannot leave with her.  He gives her permission to leave without him, and since she's still utterly destroyed by what she was forced to watch, she's thinking that this place, this marriage, THIS GUY is not for me.

Meanwhile, James seems to have a new lease on life, now that he can murder someone and get away with it.  He thinks it's his entrée into a rare club of rich folks, led by Gabi and Alban, who commit crimes and then watch themselves die, repeatedly.  He's definitely along for the ride.  As the locals celebrate before the monsoon season hits, and most of the resorts shut down, our gang of rich white a-holes wear some pretty freaky masks, and then run around hurting people and committing crimes.

                   Gabi encourages James to shoot some people already!  Everyone's doing it!

                               Gabi shows James how it's done in her own inimitable way

Mia Goth, as Gabi in Infinity Pool, is giving this performance at ELEVEN.  Seriously, you know she's kind of terrible, but at the same time she's so magnetic and out of control, she's really the heart of this film.  I loved watching her easily convincing James to commit ever increasingly horrible acts of violence, and she is luminescent onscreen.  

As a film that centers sex and violence, Infinity Pool is visually gorgeous--largely due to several drug trips the characters take in the course of the film.  

                                        Mia Goth, luminescent as Gabi in a drug-fueled orgy
 

Because the film is entirely through James's subjectivity, the line between fantasy and reality is almost always unclear.  Add some hallucinogens to the mix, and it's hard to tell who he's having sex with and how.  SPOILERS FOLLOW.  The nasty rich gang coerces him into participating in the brutal beating of Thresh, the head cop, and he inhales drugs in order to amp up his violence, only to discover that he was actually pounding the crap out of his own double--something Gabi and friends think is funny.  "It's just a prank, James."  When he runs away from this scenario, and returns to his room at the resort, he hurtles into the bathroom and grabs his passport, which he was hiding taped under the toilet.  Yes, he hid his own passport, so he couldn't leave with his wife!  Yet, when he finally  tries to leave the resort, the nasty rich folks are not having it, and spectators discover that Gabi, et al, have something even more vile in store for him.

                                          James's latest double on a leash, and ready to kill him

Key to enjoying the film's ending is caring one iota about James, which I just never do.  He never strays from his pathetic path, and he's in this mess all due to his weak ego, and his fertile desire to belong to the wealthy class.  The breastfeeding scene (yes, there is one) suggests that James has been reborn, and in a way, he has been.  The question is how many times?  Quite frankly, who knows how many doubles are out there by film's end--or who is the OG James.  I'm not giving away the ending, but it felt very meh to me, and I'm much more interested in what Gabi's up to in Los Angeles.  Still, Infinity Pool is a visually provocative film worth watching, and if you are not too upset by the weirdness, give it a spin.  The film is currently streaming on Hulu.

Fantasia 2018--Lifechanger--Justin McConnell (2018)

Drew (Jack Foley in this iteration) gets on with the labor of survival in Justin McConnell's Lifechanger (2018)

One of Fantasia Film Festival's many pleasures is the ability not only to see amazing new horror films, but also see them first.  Fantasia 2018 screened the world premiere of Justin McConnell's thoughtful and gruesome feature Lifechanger, and while I haven't seen the director's other work, this body jumping genre piece really impressed me (and a good chunk of the Fantasia audience that stuck around, full of questions, during the Q & A).

Lifechanger introduces us to Drew in its first moments through the character's voice-over, a remarkably consistent insight into the character as it jumps from person to person through claiming their bodies, and seemingly their memories as well.  Drew has just "taken" Emily Roberts (Elitsa Bako), leaving a rather desiccated corpse double beside it, one of which the body thief will quickly dispose.  So, from the first moments, viewers are introduced to the film's monster, quite sympathetically.  As we know, subjective narration can really align us with characters that commit questionable actions with equally questionable motivations.  Drew states that it takes over people to survive, not with any malicious intent, but out of desperation as its body begins to rot (which creates some nice goopy moments).  Over the course of the film, Drew inhabits a variety of differently gendered bodies, although the film loses some of the subversiveness this gender swapping might entail, by 1) maintaining Drew's voice-over by a distinctly male actor (Bill Oberst Jr.) and 2) by having the character's mission be the single-minded pursuit of melancholy Julia (Lora Burke), with which Drew had a "love connection" with a couple of years ago while inhabiting the body of her husband, Richard, who happened to up-and-disappear shortly after the couple's son died.  Coincidence?  You'll notice that I'm trying to avoid male or female pronouns when discussing Drew, because despite the film's narrative leanings, Drew is definitely "other."

Julia chatting with Rachel aka Drew at the Monarch Lounge

Julia is the very picture of loss, and Drew does whatever it takes to be near her, meeting up at her drinking haunt, The Monarch Lounge, in a variety of bodies/guises.  Drew can either accelerate its bodily decay (by snorting prodigious amounts of blow) or stave it off (through antibiotics), and some of the film's most exciting tensions circle around "the authorities" discovering Drew's "body farm" full of previous incarnations, and hunting down Rachel, who wisely becomes Robert (Jack Foley) just when the police are closing in.  Another bonus is the fact that Rachel was a dental assistant, so she had access to quite a few antibiotics that Drew uses to slow down his decomp while it courts a sadly clueless Julia as her new beau.  Yet, Drew is a monster with a conscience, and it wears the weight of its crimes heavily; when it decides to tell Julia its true nature....well, things don't go quite like it had planned. 

The necessity to change bodies more frequently, for its survival, weighs heavily on Drew

While some people might be put off by the humanizing of Drew, the film's consistent voice-over led to an increased consistency in relation to the performance of a variety of different actors, all who seem to clearly embody Drew, whether housed in a male or female body.  The only thing that really sticks for me, and which the director mentioned frankly in the Q & A, is the "stalking as romance" trope that underlies the majority of the narrative.  While McConnell suggests that the film is an examination of toxic masculinity, I think the film also really compels viewers to hope that Drew can capture Julia's heart, no matter what form it takes.  The film makes it hard to be really critical of Drew--what's a body thief to do if it doesn't want to die, right?

Credit thus goes to both McConnell for writing such well-drawn characters, and for the first-rate performers (many of whom took to the stage at the Q & A) who embodied them.  Lora Burke's Julia is by turns witty and tragic, and always eminently likeable, while Drew's iterations, shackled with its bodily memories, are each utterly unique, but then subtly changed once they transform into Drew.  The fact that the cast pulls off this trick with such agility speaks to both their outstanding talent and McConnell's masterful direction.  I've been careful not to give anything away, but the ending of this film is a doozy--kind of gross, and quite thought-provoking.  I do hope that Lifechanger gets the screenings it deserves.  After theaters and VOD, it would be nice if Netflix or Shudder picked up this gem so that it reaches a larger audience.  Highly recommended!!

Fantasia 2017--Replace--Norbert Keil

Rebecca Forsythe's Kira commands every frame in Norbert Keil's Replace (2017)

Norbert Keil's body horror extravaganza Replace is one of the most gorgeous films I have ever seen at Fantasia.  Seriously, every single frame was drenched in color, and the settings are glorious, whether a scene takes place in Kira's grunge chic apartment, a dingy (but colorfully-lit) nightclub, or the harsh, but stylish minimalism of Dr. Crober's office.  Like The Neon Demon, Replace is rife with sumptuous imagery that dazzles the eye, and I loved looking at it.  Wow.  At times the film replicated some of the very best giallos that I've seen, and there's a definite Argento look with a Cronenberg vibe.

Kira is understandably disturbed by her body's rapid decay

That said, the film also maintains some similar themes to Winding-Refn's art horror, as it focuses on Kira Mabon (Rebecca Forsythe), a young beauty who mysteriously develops some nasty skin rash where her body starts to decay at a rapid rate.  As this film is a horror film, we get to experience close-up shots with lots of icky sounds as Kira peels the skin right from her body.  The film purports to be a treatise on aging, as Kira's story is interspersed with her voice-over narration outlining her fear and contempt for the aging process.

The mysterious Dr. Crober (Barbara Crampton) may have answers to what's ailing Kira

She is yet another (white, thin) beauty who wants to remain that way forever, and she turns to the mysteriously calm/mad scientist Dr. Rafaela Crober (Barbara Crampton) for help.  Yet Dr. Crober seems to know more than she's letting on, and Kira's inability to remember what happened last week doesn't help matters.

Kira is forced to kill in order to maintain her haunting loveliness

When Kira's bodily deterioration starts to happen too rapidly, and a skin transplant looks to take too long, Kira takes matters into her own hands, and finds replacements for her skin in a series of rather gory and unfortunate murders.  She has become quite the monster.  Still, when we finally get answers to what's happening, the silliness of the film rises to new heights, even if some of the science that inspires the film is grounded in advancements in stem cell research and insights into the aging process.

Sophia (Lucie Aron) is the gorgeous "girl next door" who suddenly falls for Kira

My biggest problem with this film is that it's couched in a quasi-lesbian romance that makes no sense beyond a certain need for gratuitous shots of gorgeous women kissing each other.  I get the appeal (duh), but do we really need to watch monstrous queer women killers YET AGAIN??  Here's another white guy making a film about women and their monstrous desires, and he makes sure that there are as many topless shots of this implausible couple as possible.  It doesn't help that their scenes are shot in such hazy soft-focus with melodramatic music blasting behind them, as if they share some true love amidst the horror.  A critique on the perils of beauty culture and the relationship between femininity and aging?  Not really.

Still, Fantasia has this amazing ability to persuade me to give a film more consideration after I dismiss it for its flaws, chiefly by virtue of listening to the filmmakers talk about their film and the process of making it.  Just as I whispered something about the filmmakers having been totally wasted writing this doozy, Keil and famous genre stalwart and co-writer Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) made a case for their film and its particular charms.  The person who really charmed me was Stanley, in his outback biker get-up, hair flowing, and sharp intelligence in his eyes, as he waxed on about gene therapy, the perils of aging, and the site of memory (is it in our brains or in our D.N.A.)?   Wow, okay.  He also suggested that the film nodded at vampirism, and I can see it, certainly.  He's incredibly smart and articulate, and I would have loved to talk to him for hours about whatever.

Crampton did research at the Buck Institute for aging for the role

Barbara Crampton was also onstage with her characteristic warmth and wit, and she let on that the role of Dr. Crober was originally intended for a male character.  While I'm delighted that she was chosen for the part, and certainly there needs to be more roles for women, I think it might have been better to have that part played by a man.  The Neon Demon's one saving grace was that it really emphasized how horrible men are in relation to women's beauty, and that they were really the driving force behind women killing themselves (and each other) in order to maintain their attraction and desirability. Crampton's role as a cold-hearted, ambitious mad scientist who ruthlessly capitalizes on women's vulnerability and vanity in order to make scientific discoveries does not do women any favors, and just perpetuates the idea that women are bitches who will destroy each other in order to get ahead.  Nice.

Replace is equal parts beautiful and problematic

So, should you see Replace?  Yes, if only to form your own opinion about the film, and also because it is truly gorgeous to look at.  The ending elicited an epic eye roll from me, the twist is beyond silly and undermines any romance that the film presents, but I'm still thinking about the film, and find its comparisons to The Neon Demon to be notable and important.  While its gender politics are a hot mess, this intriguing film is definitely worth a look.