What does it mean to lose touch with your humanity? Does it mean becoming cruel and leaving behind all compassion? These are the questions that writer-director Brandon Cronenberg’s film Infinity Pool poses, which quite definitively provides a series of increasingly grim and violent answers to each one.
Much like his previous film In Another’s Skin, this new film, where the director is shown in the best traditions of his father, the great and inimitable David Cronenberg, is a hallucinogenic story on the theme of violence and destruction. The central characters, instead of being disgusted by this, begin to strive to get more and more for their consumption. Being immersed in how it all happens requires going all the way to the end.
Fame actors Cleopatra Coleman as Em and Alexander Skarsgård as her husband James play a handsome young couple who go on vacation to Lee Tolka’s fictional resort in Eastern Europe, where they encounter Mia Goth as Gaby, a charming eccentric who soon pulls them in. into a world for which they were completely unprepared. Murders, mayhem, illegal cloning, blatant nudity and drunken days on the beach are all part of this creation.
What is the movie Infinity Pool about?
The whole action of horror begins with the writer James, who is going on vacation with his young one, experiencing a creative decline. He hopes to find inspiration, as he has not written a new book in many years. Trouble begins when he meets Gaby, who invites James and his wife to accompany her on a trip with her husband outside the resort.
She flatters his ego enough by telling him how much she loves his book to make him forget any potential problems. On the way back from the trip, James suggests they take the wheel, as everyone else is either tired or drunk. He subsequently accidentally hits a farmer with a car and kills him before fleeing. The next day he is arrested and told that he will be executed. However, he can pay to have a clone created in his place. The only thing is that he and Em will have to watch the execution.
When they return to the hotel and she desperately wants to leave, he can’t seem to find his passport. It is later revealed that this was a hoax and James actually hid the document so that he would have an excuse to stay.
Leaving his troubled wife behind, the protagonist joins Gabi and her hilarious group of wealthy killers who terrorize the vacation spot, knowing they will never be held accountable. The audience watches as they all cheer and cheer for each other as their new clones die in confrontation with each other. All this is a game in which they can be as cruel and depraved as they want. Their wealth gives them the power to do anything to anyone. Even versions of themselves that have all their memories and scream when they are killed are expendable. James is intoxicated by this new life. Once Em leaves to get away from it all, he gets worse than ever before.
That is, until he is tricked into beating and almost killing his own double with his own hands. Initially, this is a line he won’t cross, and he tries to run away from the rest of the group. This proves useless when Gabi tracks him down and forces him to brutally kill his doppelgänger by crushing his head. As she, and then everyone else, leaves on their own flights, James returns to stay at an empty resort in the pouring rain. He has changed forever and can no longer return home. After everything he’s learned about himself, James would rather be left alone with the worst sides of who he’s become than be anywhere else.
The meaning of the movie “Infinity Pool”
Just as the younger Cronenberg’s previous film ended with the character realizing he no longer has any connection to his past self due to the corrupting power of violence, Infinity Pool shows how the rich indulge their base desires. All of them are real “animals”, which they continue to call everyone else. What separates James from Gaby and everyone else is that although he initially tries to escape, the man is actually unable to get rid of the new version of himself.
His only hesitation was because he didn’t want to get his hands dirty by hurting a man who looked a lot like himself. It wasn’t compassion that made him think. Rather, it was arrogance and vanity. James never had any remorse that kept him from hurting others, which meant that the extra step of killing his doppelgänger was simply an admission of his true nature, which was just waiting to break free.
The fact that he wasn’t rich and instead lived on the money of the Em family makes this even more unsettling, as it shows that anyone can get lost in the dark. James is reborn in blood and violence, to the point where he even breastfeeds Gaby, who is covered in the blood of his doppelganger he just destroyed. When he is shown sitting alone in the rain in the final shot, it’s possible that Cronenberg is trying to imply that he may actually be desperately trying to cleanse himself of everything he’s done so far.
This potentially redeeming idea is compromised by the place he returns to. Instead of going home, he returned to the place where all his soul or humanity he had was lost.
No matter how hard he tries, it’s impossible to “purify” as he’s more like rich monsters than he’ll ever want to admit. Despite the fact that James considered himself a good person, he was capable of immense cruelty. All it took was a little push.
Ending Infinity Pool Explanation
One night, failed writer James and his wife, Em, decide to take a trip outside the cozy resort. Guests are warned not to leave the hotel grounds as the country is dangerous and unpredictable. But they bribe a security guard to let them borrow his car and they set off with Goth and her partner Alban. When away, they all spend the day on the beach, drinking and talking about life and their careers. On the way back from the beach, James gets behind the wheel and hits a local resident to death.
It is then that the gang gets acquainted with the laws that govern the local environment – primarily with the fact that if someone is killed (even by accident), the victim’s family can kill in revenge. But there is a loophole for politicians and rich assholes. For a fee, the scientists at Lee Tolk can create an exact universal double right at the police station. Then a family member can still retaliate, and an escaped culprit can still watch his dear clone being killed.
Undeterred by Em’s departure, James becomes even more attached to Gabi, Alban, and their gang, joining them during a home invasion, taking a psychedelic drug native to the island, and having some very strange group sex. James eventually tries to leave a gang of bloodthirsty pranksters and is shot at; he stumbles upon a local family’s house and wakes up, only for Gaby to find him.
She breeds a “dog”, which is another clone of James, but wilder, going around with a collar and leash. James ends up fighting his doppelgänger and killing him in a very graphic sequence, effectively turning his head into jelly. After that, they all prepare to return home. As they board the bus to the airport, they talk about the trivial errands they will have to complete when they get back to their lives. Nothing is said about murder, or drugs, or clones. Everything just returns to normal.
James drives to the airport and is ready to board his plane back to the United States. The terminal is empty. The planes are taking off. And instead of heading home, the forever changed hero returns to a resort that was closed for the rainy season. The final shot of the film shows James sitting in one of the chairs by the pool, a thick sheet of rain lashing him. This is the only vacation that changed him forever.
