A down-on-his-luck writer (I’m with you so far) vacations on his wealthy wife’s money in a resort in La Tolqa. La Tolqa is a brutal, very religious, but poor country. They need tourists. As the writer, James, discovers, their laws are very strict for a reason. If a tourist commits a crime they are executed. However, if they have enough money they can buy a “double,” essentially a clone of themselves, that can be executed for them. Needless to say, this happens to James. The name David Cronenberg evokes body horror. Infinity Pool is the work of his son Brandon Cronenberg and although body horror’s part of it, there’s an even deeper existential fear at work. Once James’ double dies, his wife insists they leave this horrid place immediately. James isn’t so sure.
The trouble is that he’s befriended another couple, and the wife, Gabi, has been making no-so-subtle advances on James and he’s intrigued. This couple sets him up so that he’s likely to break a law, which leads to the killing. But they’re not finished. Along with another group of Americans, they travel to La Tolqa every year to commit crimes so they can watch their doubles being killed. “Murder tourism,” as one reviewer calls it. They want James to become one of them. They start putting him into positions where he has to kill his own double. You can see the existential horror pretty clearly from this vantage point. Finally realizing that they’ve been mocking him, James tries to escape, but can’t. As long as the penalty for a crime can be payed by buying a double, they can commit outrageous crimes with impunity.
I have to admit that I envy those who have a family business. (Mine was alcoholism, so I chose a different career path, such as it is.) If your father is a well-known, even if often castigated, horror director, you have some guidance on how to get started in the business. My sense of Infinity Pool is that it’s quite effective, almost at art film at some points. Like some of his father’s films, it involves both sci-fi elements and horror. Budapest and Croatia are evocative shooting locations. The story, while not entirely satisfying, intrigues. It raises too early the question of whether the double, which has all the memories and thoughts of the original, is really watching the death of the person who actually committed the crime. Are these copies their own death sentence? This isn’t resolved, but it’s strongly implied that they’re not. Still, I’m not inclined to vacation in La Tolqa, which is no place for struggling writers.
