Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
While staying at an isolated island resort, James and Em are enjoying a perfect vacation of pristine beaches, exceptional staff, and soaking up the sun. But guided by the seductive and mysterious Gabi, they venture outside the resort grounds and find themselves in a culture filled with violence, hedonism, and untold horror. A tragic accident leaves them facing a zero tolerance policy for crime: either you'll be executed, or, if you’re rich enough to afford it, you can watch yourself die instead.
Infinity Pool is a visually audacious, deeply weird body-horror provocation from Brandon Cronenberg that earns its high marks in Cinematography and Novelty. Karim Hussain's DOP work is genuinely exceptional — lurid, hallucinatory sequences (particularly the drug-trip orgy scenes) feel like nothing else in recent horror. The concept of wealthy tourists purchasing clone-execution doubles as a vehicle for exploring privilege, identity erosion, and hedonistic self-destruction is distinctive and singular, squarely in the Cronenberg family's body-horror lineage but unmistakably Brandon's own voice. The plot is engaging in its first two acts, though it begins to feel repetitive and circular as it progresses — the cycling structure is intentional but the dramatic momentum dissipates. Acting is serviceable: Mia Goth is electric and clearly the film's most compelling presence, while Alexander Skarsgård competently plays passive dissolution but rarely transcends it. The ending is the film's weakest element — it trails off into ambiguity that feels less like earned open-endedness and more like the film simply running out of ideas, leaving James exactly where he started with little cumulative payoff.