Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth and Cleopatra Coleman star in Infinity Pool, the new mind-bending sci-fi horror from Brandon Cronenberg (Possessor). A devotee of practical effects, sometimes you must get silly to look horrific, Cronenberg tells Stephen A Russell at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Infinity Pool
As is their wont, the French have a poetic flourish of a phrase for the animalistic pleasure of an orgasm. “La petite mort” is particularly pertinent in body horror scion Brandon Cronenberg’s latest magnificently malevolent shocker Infinity Pool. The Northman’s Alexander Skarsgård and fast-rising Australian star Cleopatra Coleman portray a bored couple drifting aimlessly in a The White Lotus-like luxury resort who are soon led wildly astray by Mia Goth’s fellow guest into a pitch-dark world of body doubles, burglaries and brutal executions.
It’s an erotic nightmare packed with psychedelic trip-outs that blur the line between death and pleasure. But if you watch these freak-out sequences and figure it’s all done on computers, think again. “All the hallucinations in Infinity Pool are 100% practical, in camera,” Cronenberg says as we sit down in a suite at the Ritz-Carlton during the Berlin International Film Festival, expanding on startling sights that include ferociously vicious knifings and the eye-opening appearance of a penis emerging from a breast.
“I work with a core team of people who love to play with the form, and my cinematographer Karim Hussain is a perfect example,” Cronenberg says. “He’s a kind of mad genius, and we tend to feed off each other when we’re experimenting, leading into a film.”
That leads to some surprising solutions. “Before you know it, we’re doing what I’m told looks like a stupid puppet show,” Cronenberg chuckles. “Because we’re dangling gels and glass in front of the lens and flaring things and wiggling bits. It’s extremely low tech that looks extremely stupid, but people put up with us because we’re enthusiastic.”
He recalls one dumb moment capturing a shot of Oscar nominee Andrea Riseborough in his startlingly good previous feature Possessor (Flicks’ favourite film of 2020, incidentally). “I was on the floor with two light tubes just sort of flashing lights in her face as she was screaming and wiggling her head and one of my producers walked in, looked at us and, then walked right back out,” he laughs. “It looks ridiculous, but you get addicted to playing with the form once you start down that path.”
Goth, much like Riseborough, was extremely up for this kind of practical silliness that translates to spectacular imagery once up on the big screen. Cronenberg had wanted to work with the Suspiria, X and Pearl star for years. “Certain actors just burn through the screen, and Mia is the perfect example,” he says. “Every time I see her in something, she just steals every scene that she’s in. She’s so incredible.”
Skarsgård, too, is up for the insanity. “He’s willing to push himself to such incredible and surprising places,” Cronenberg says. “I just want to take brilliant actors like them and plug them into my characters, because, by the time I’m shooting, I’ve gotten a bit bored of them after working the script for so long. They’ve kind of gone to sleep, and I want someone like Mia and Alex to grab them and shake them awake.”
There’s little chance of falling asleep during Infinity Pool, as exceedingly privileged types misbehave wildly in the poor community beyond the resort’s pearly gates. The fictional island of La Tolqa has access to a ritualistic ceremony that can create exact doubles of anyone. The rich can pay to have these duplicates executed in their stead if they commit crimes punishable by death. Folks lacking empathy see this as an invitation to behave disgracefully and dangerously.
The replicant idea was the first to come to Cronenberg. “It’s like picking out a thread that gets stuck in my head,” he says. “The idea of someone watching an exact likeness being executed, and what that says about identity, punishment and justice, was irresistible.”
As fans of The White Lotus will know, terrible people on vacation are ripe material for satirising, to varying degrees of brutal dismemberment. “The resort setting was a very easy environment to create a story about people behaving without conventional consequences, where their worst impulses surface,” Cronenberg says.
He doesn’t believe in the concept of a soul, so he enjoyed exploring the idea of consciousness jumping into a new body. “I think that we’re just performing ourselves, in creating these characters in collaboration with each other, and that’s something I get stuck on. I don’t think humans are essentially good or evil, but I do think that we’re animals, and I’m interested in what happens when there isn’t a socially imposed civility. If you look at human beings throughout time, mostly we’ve been incredibly violent. We’re totally rubbish. There’s a very thin buffer between civilisation as we know it, and just a bunch of monsters.”
