Infinity Pool (2023)

Brandon Cronenberg expands on his father’s body-horror style in a brilliant, disturbing thriller that takes down wealth and privilege through unexpected, unnerving territory and self-destruction. It dives deep into violence and group deviance while questioning identity.

Cronenberg delivers a visually engrossing and gross slice of nightmare fuel heavy on vibes rather than plot, a grubby downer of a holiday movie that tackles dark tourism and desire with seductive, sickening style.

Brandon Cronenberg’s latest is a weird and wonderful identity crisis-as-body horror film that serves as a biting satire of wealth and colonial tourism. Mia Goth delivers a ferocious, fearless, and funny performance as the seductive and sadistic Gabi.

Cronenberg crafts an uneasy offbeat atmosphere with kaleidoscopic visuals and body horror bursts, making for a fascinatingly unusual work that poses interesting questions about the darker side of the human psyche.

Cronenberg serves up a deliriously depraved satire of super-rich excess and tourists behaving badly, a twisted sci-fi-comedy-horror ride full of gore, orgies and hallucinogens that is damn-near unmissable and addictive.

Cronenberg delivers a wildly surreal and compelling body horror film about privilege and morality that takes big swings even if not all land perfectly. The committed performances, especially Mia Goth's riveting turn, help make it confidently made and worth watching.

The film is a singularly unnerving experience punctuated by outlandish and disquieting moments that compensate for an episodic and repetitive script, with Skarsgård's icy performance perfectly attuned to the chilly vision.

Cronenberg goes off the deep end in this deranged critique of Western decadence featuring grotesque imagery and a cautionary tale of runaway hedonism at a resort where the rich can literally get away with murder. Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth deliver courageous and cackling performances amid the brain-shattering nightmare logic.

The critic describes the film as a raunchy, provocative sci-fi shocker with a brilliant conceit involving cloning after a hit-and-run on a poverty-stricken island resort, but notes that the premise is left naggingly unfulfilled amid orgiastic and gore-soaked elements reminiscent of The White Lotus. It focuses on the wealthy tourists' descent into violence and the clone procedure's ramifications.

The third and best Cronenberg film to date offers extreme imagery and a phantasmagoric ode to staying too long at the party, but the woozy spectacles eventually become numbing. It portrays soulless jet-setters as walking dead.

The critic finds less than meets the eye in this hermetic if visually striking horror, with Skarsgård and Goth chewing scenery amid plenty of viscera but little depth beyond the premise of cloned punishment for wealthy tourists.

Cronenberg fixates on freaking viewers out with lurid sci-fi provocation, trippy visuals, and bacchanalian revelry but neglects deeper substance, staying in the shallow end. It evokes other extreme films but lacks the clinical distance of his father’s work.

Cronenberg’s explicit psychedelic thriller is cold and clammy despite fearlessly warped turns from Skarsgård and Goth. The hedonistic tourism story stays shallow.

The critic describes a slick, satirical, insane thrill-ride that dazzles with dark sci-fi conceits, black humour and visceral violence, answering what terrible things rich people would do without accountability. It highlights Mia Goth's genius, demented femme fatale performance as the main draw.

The review positions the film as sophisticated, nihilistic sci-fi body horror comparable to David Cronenberg's best work, commending its exploration of wealth, repulsion, and moral murkiness through the leads' performances, especially Alexander Skarsgård's portrayal of cruelty and self-loathing. It calls the movie bracing and up there with classics like Dead Ringers.

The critic highlights Mia Goth's live-wire, anarchic performance as the standout element driving Brandon Cronenberg's satirical thriller about wealthy tourists on a remote island resort who become entangled in cloning and doppelganger paranoia. It praises the film's stylish, visceral body-horror approach and black comedy while noting its nightmarish logic and appeal to fans of boundary-pushing cinema.

The film is an ultraviolent satire of unchecked privilege at a luxury resort, essentially The White Lotus with gore and cloning, but it lacks substance beyond shock value. Skarsgård and Goth deliver committed performances amid the body horror and depravity.

The critic finds the film luridly enjoyable and creepy, with sudden tonal shifts blending blood-churning moments, dark humour and thought-provoking satire on the wealthy. It praises the performances of Skarsgård and especially Goth as the provocative agent of mischief.

The review calls it depraved, sexually ambivalent and disturbing, with Hitchcock-on-acid weirdness, sly social commentary and mind-bending sequences targeting wealth and moral decay. It singles out Goth's unique, menacing and hypnotic performance as the standout.

The review finds it stylish but ultimately shallow, praising fresh ways to disturb and nauseate via camera work and masks, plus strong committed performances from Skarsgård and Goth, while questioning if there is much more to it beyond hedonistic thrills and boundaries-testing scenes.

The film is Cronenberg’s most original and ambitious yet, a nightmarish fusion of influences that gets under the skin with its extreme cinema. It explores an artist’s quest to feel alive through perverse ideas about identity, autonomy, graphic violence and sex.

The critic finds the film a mix of shocking imagery and uneven narrative, praising the abstract horror sequences and performances by Skarsgård and Goth but noting it doesn't fully explore its class themes.

The critic describes the film as a wild, shocking, and perverse bloody mess that doubles down on hedonistic and transgressive elements, praising its exploration of the idle rich and colonial tourism wrapped in extreme imagery.

The film is a riot of sex, murder and intoxication with appropriate sonic ferocity. It praises Mia Goth's chilling performance while noting it is not for the squeamish.

The critic describes Infinity Pool as a deeply weird, often flawed film with imagery and ideas that linger. It begins as a wry comment on the corrupting power of wealth before descending into a trippy quagmire of excess, with some jarringly outlandish scenes threatening the tension, though strong performances from Skarsgård and Goth help bridge the halves.

Cronenberg's third film fails to deliver on its transgressive ambitions due to a weak script, resulting in shock value that induces apathy rather than discomfort.

The film squanders a promising high-concept premise on generic themes of insecure masculinity and fails to explore its ideas meaningfully. Extreme sex and violence amount to little more than superficial, disappointing imagery for fans of the genre.