Brandon Cronenberg wants audiences to experience ‘Infinity Pool’ in a visceral way

Brandon Cronenberg’s latest movie, “Infinity Pool,” is a boundary-pushing horror film that’s visceral and unsettling, and that’s exactly the desired effect for the audience.

The Toronto filmmaker takes big swings with his third feature film after “Antiviral” (2012) and “Possessor” (2020).

“I did write it between my first and second film, and there was an eight-year gap where I was trying to get financing and kind of spinning my wheels and not sure my career was going anywhere. So there are some self-mocking references to writer insecurity, but they come from my own experience,” Cronenberg, who was in Toronto to introduce the movie on Wednesday along with his cast, said in an interview.

The film follows James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman), who are enjoying a perfect vacation on an all-inclusive resort in a fictional country. When the mysterious Gabi (Mia Goth) and her friends take them outside the resort grounds, they find themselves in a culture filled with violence, hedonism and untold horror.

Tragedy strikes when James is involved in a hit-and-run and there’s a zero-tolerance policy for crime. He is given a choice: be executed or, if you’re rich enough to afford it, you can clone yourself and watch the clone be killed instead.

The movie, for which Cronenberg wrote the screenplay, was originally a short story about “seeing someone watching themselves being executed in this fictional state. I guess I was just interested in, to some extent, the nature of identity and what makes a person a person and, I think, the social desire for revenge that sometimes lies beneath punishment, even if we frame it as corrective or preventive,” he said.

“For me, it’s very much a narrative about character psychology … on the one hand, you have these people who essentially are bland people in a bland context, which is the resort. But given a freedom from conventional consequence, this kind of animal violence and carnality is able to bubble up and to mutate.

“I felt it was important for the audience to really feel in a visceral way those scenes and that kind of contrast between the sex and violence in the movie, and then the kind of banal resort stuff.”

His film will undoubtedly draw comparisons to his father, David Cronenberg, whose movies include the same level of violent, gory horror. However, the younger Cronenberg’s vision for his high-concept indie entry stands on its own merit and explores his own fascination with the world.

“It’s always incredibly satisfying to be able to make any film and you’re incredibly fortunate, especially as an indie filmmaker, to get any film made,” he said. “So it’s satisfying in that way, but it’s essentially a bag of my own interest that I’m kind of exploring and using the film in some ways as a lens to process my own thoughts about the world.”

Goth, who has been anointed as the scream queen of recent years after her chilling turns in “Pearl” and “X,” gives a riveting performance. And Skarsgård digs deep into the primal and physically demanding nature of his role. Clearly, the actors shared the 43-year-old filmmaker’s vision for the movie and delivered as he gave them the freedom to explore the characters in the rich roles created.

“Casting is mostly about identifying actors who have this certain difficult-to-articulate thing that I think a lot of us recognize when they come onscreen and they’re immediately captivating … They’re always totally fascinating and compelling and interesting in this completely exciting way. Both Alex and Mia are actors like that for me.”

When asked if there was a scene that felt impossible to pull off, Cronenberg said “the entire film is like that. Even though I’ve sort of been working at this for 20 years now, I’m also in a way just at the start of my career; it’s only my third film and there were these huge gaps between my films and before ‘Infinity Pool.’ So it always feels like it’s gonna be impossible to make a film and then to do it is always very surprising to everybody.”

Cronenberg has cemented himself in the horror space as a talented indie filmmaker who uses the genre to address socio-political themes.

“Horror gives you a space to explore certain difficult emotions in a safe way,” he said. “Horror to me can sometimes work as a laboratory, where you can engage with a certain part of the human emotional spectrum that’s very healthy but also, from the political perspective, it lets you take the world and caricature it a little bit in a way where you’re emphasizing certain real-world horrors in the context of something that’s totally visceral for an audience to watch.”

He continued: “I think genre, including horror but also in general, and including science fiction, is great for that because when you take the real world and you skew it, just slightly, people … are able to see the real world from a different perspective, and that’s why it’s so useful from a political and also a satirical perspective.”

There has been a recent wave of eat-the-rich satires like Emmy-winning series “The White Lotus,” Oscar-nominated film “Triangle of Sadness” and Golden-Globe nominated “The Menu,” and Cronenberg finds it interesting to be part of that trend, even though he wrote the story a while ago.

“I started working on the original story for this at least as far back as 2014 or maybe earlier. It took quite a few years to develop. So certainly, I had no way of judging the mood of 2023 or knowing that it would be part of this wave of related films, but sometimes things just sync up that way.”

So what then scares Cronenberg? “Doing interviews,” he said dryly. If he could clone himself for this, I’m sure he would.

Marriska Fernandes is a Toronto-based entertainment reporter and film critic. She is a freelance contributor for the Star’s Culture section. Follow her on Twitter: @marrs_fers

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