Infinity Pool
A writer goes to a resort for inspiration, and gets a forced bout of self-discovery. An extremely forceful discovery of who he really his. Not even his girlfriend can keep him grounded in noblesse oblige.
The main couple is almost estranged. They meet another couple, fans of his work. They have dinner together, and barbs flow. He’s a “writer”, wrote some shit years before and is coasting on his wife’s money. On their second meeting in a secluded beach away from the resort, she outright mentions her daddy issues. The writer doesn’t really react to this, he’s really shocked with the impromptu tugjob from his fangirl.
They get drunk on that getaway on the secluded beach, but since our writer is the most sober, he gets to be the designated driver. He’s not so sober he cannot swerve in time to kill some random villager. The other couple are veterans at slumming it, so they keep the body and scram back to the resort, surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire.
Alas, the cops find out about it the next day and he is taken for a interrogation. His wife accompanied him, but they are separated, and the inspector in charge debriefs him: he killed a man, so his first-born son can knife him until he bleed together like a pig. Then he proposes the deal he doesn’t have much opportunity to say no: pay an hefty sum and allow for them to clone your body and memories, so the clone can be killed in your stead. The family needs to watch, though. They reluctantly do, but our protagonist actually enjoys this, he has a creepy-ass slasher smile.
The writer can’t get enough of its self-actualisation, particularly if it involves the sex he can’t get from his official wife, so he hides his passport and decides to prolong his stay. Without his girlfriend, he spins out of control and goes absolutely bananas, they have drug-fuelled orgies and invade a rich guy mansion, A Clockwork Orange-style.
More “pranks” ensue, and it helps to be permanently drunk or high (or both), but our protagonist snaps when he has to beat the shit out of another of his own body doubles. By this time, he tries to escape, but fails after the gang shoots into his bus and kidnaps him. He folds like a wet paper bag he is. After being humiliated some more, he runs away, but they catch up to him and force him to kill another double with his bare hands. He tries to resist but it’s pointless.
When the rainy season comes up, they all go back home. Our protagonist has fully self-actualised, so he recognises he is part of the problem, so he stays in the unnamed country to avoid hurting his girlfriend.
It’s nepo babies on the main cast and crew: David Cronenberg’s son directing, and the oldest second-generation Skarsgård. One of the orgy participants is the main Martha from The Handmaid’s Tale, I knew I had seen her somewhere. Mia Goth confirms her stardom, with a completely different role compared to Pearl, it’s uncanny.
Since it’s a (baby) Cronenberg film, people are made of play-doh, but there’s not much body horror, it’s more about existential dread. There’s also the political undercurrent of tourism in impoverished regions (slumming it) but not sure this doesn’t do exactly what it purports to criticise. Not many Hungarian or Czech names in the cast.
The cultural appropriation bits are very over the top, the Jewish caricatures are ridiculous, but it’s literally a background cameo.
There’s also the scene where the protagonist is mocked for being a fraud and an hack, for only writing his book because his family connection, another self-aware quip by the director.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.