Brandon Cronenberg make a montage that doesn't give me a migraine (challenge level: impossible).

As far as premise goes, Infinity Pool has a pretty good one. That said, both the setup and ultimate floundering non-message that the premise induces is all incredibly disappointing. The main sci-fi conceit is fine on its face, it's just the way that it's used is stupid. The idea that the rich elite can sneak their way out of the criminal punishment of execution by way of cloning is a sort of straight forward but still interesting analogy for how the rich elite in the real world can avoid criminal charges thanks to their wealth and connections; but of course that isn't a story, it's just a thing that happens.

This is the problem Infinity Pool runs into. The story extends from the premise in a way that wraps around itself and hurts the world building. Why is this technology seemingly limited to Li Tolqa, the fictitious country the movie takes place in? Why is the country shown to be so rural and poor if they've got this technology that rich tourists and diplomats use all the time and have to pay for? Where even is this that it looks like a tropical island but has a bunch of Eastern Europeans for its native population? These things aren't issues in the sense that they can't be explained away, but more so because the resulting dreamlike trance of "just go with it" leads to nowhere with emotional connectivity.

Alexander Skarsgård's character, James, wrote a book once six years before the movie takes place and has come to this resort for inspiration. We never learn what his book is about, what he has to say, or why he wants to be a writer. The movie isn't about that, so the details become superfluous. He could've been anybody. But, not really, he needed to be a rich guy, so he married in to a bad relationship because she had money. He needed to be unsuccessful because his insecurities are what lead him down the dark path we witness in the movie. Like, okay, I get it, but the details have no life in them. His character is unspecific to a fault. Everyone is unspecific to a fault. All the characters are huge assholes and I can't sympathize with them because I can't understand where they are coming from because the movie doesn't properly tell me. I'm okay with unsympathetic characters, but I'm not okay with a movie lacking characterization and then watching the deconstruction of an abstract concept without being able to feel anything, just being bored and waiting for scenes to end.

Further proof the movie has nothing to say is the way the Li Tolqan's who run the resort play into appropriating other cultures presumably for the sake of their guests. To what end? Well, I don't know. It doesn't seem to matter to the plot or be making a legible statement. The most generous I'm willing to go about it being an illustration of something is that it can't have been done without intention, but whatever that intention is isn't clear enough.

Maybe I'm just stupid! I'm willing to take the L if someone can explain Infinity Pool's themes in way where everything begins to click for me and isn't just "rich people = hedonistic = bad," but as it stands I was just disappointed. Possessor is a movie that goes hard with tying its premise to more cerebral themes, so I was expecting Infinity Pool to really begin working those allegories and symbols, but it never really does. To me, it just came across as a sequence of followable events mixed with some trippy visuals, perhaps the most basic framework you can get for a movie of this type.

No thoughts, head empty. At least the movie looked pretty and had lots of blood and violence and sex and stuff in it!