Brandon Cronenberg's worlds, with their squelchy, gooey special effects and terrifying societal constructs, tend to stick with you long after they end.
His first feature, 2012’s Antiviral, introduces an obsessive pop culture landscape in which megafans are injected with copies of pathogens taken from celebrities so that they might feel a closer connection to them. Possessor, Cronenberg's 2020 follow-up, features a secretive network of body-snatchers who remotely transport their consciousnesses into people close to their targets in order to kill them. Infinity Pool, which is now playing in theaters, finds Alexander Skarsgård in a fictional Eastern European country whose tourist laws forbid law enforcement from corporally punishing anyone who is just visiting. Instead, the police have the technology to grow exact clones of the wrongdoers so that they can execute them in their stead.
“I was having memories of this vacation I was on 20 years ago,” Cronenberg explains in an interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “They bussed you into this resort compound in the middle of the night, and then you lived there for a week. There was a kind of weird fake town that you'd go to, but you couldn't actually leave the compound. And then at the end of the week, they would bus you back to the airport during the day, and you saw that the surrounding area was incredibly poverty stricken, there were people living in shacks. You realized you never actually visited the country. It was like being shipped to embassy grounds for some other tourist nation, or there was some alternate dimension that had popped up that was a weird Disneyland version of the country we're supposedly in.”
While staying at the resort with his wealthy wife, semi-successful novelist (he’s written one, barely read) James Foster (Skarsgård) falls in with a group of rich tourists who have learned how to exploit the strange country's prohibitive laws to their advantage. Breaking the rules and gleefully observing the consequences visited upon exact copies of themselves becomes something of a spectator sport, while James, prodded onward by the sociopathic Gabi (Mia Goth), sinks further into depravity.
“I really wanted to invent something that wasn't really rooted in any one particular real world culture, because it had to have this technology and this religion that was unique to that setting,” Cronenberg explains. “It ended up becoming a bit of an Eastern European fever dream that was shaped further when we actually went to Croatia and Hungary because of course, the histories in those countries of actual communism started to seep into the film.” The police cars, for example, are Soviet-era Volgas, and the palatial resort itself, the Amadria Park hotel in Šibenik, Croatia, is an exemplar of the Brutalist architecture style of that era.
Believe it or not, the real place is even stranger than it looks on film. “The resort itself was developed by this rich Croatian who wanted to turn it into a kind of Disneyland Resort where there are different areas of Croatia represented in different parts of the place,” Cronenberg says. “So there's this really elaborate fake Dalmatian village—they call it an ‘ethno-village’—that you can go to. There’s another weird swingers club and then there was a kids’ hotel with a giant octopus on it. It’s just an incredible collage of ideas.”
This overwhelming setting ended up being the perfect place for Cronenberg to shoot his film, which he explained was originally a short story about a character witnessing their own clone's death before he decided to expand it into a feature. The stark dystopian geometry of the fictional “Latoka” marries well with Infinity Pool’s lurid sequences of hallucinatory ultraviolence, where shots linger on body parts in contexts both bloody and sexual: drug-fueled orgies, crunchy face-stomping murders, and, yes, one much-publicized money shot.
This isn’t unique to Infinity Pool—in Possessor, Andrea Riseborough memorably pulls her own face off like a candy-extruder pulling taffy. Cronenberg has built a reputation for his near excessive scenes of blood and guts, yet he remains sanguine about the polarized response. “I’ve had some friends get very mad at me because they just hated it,” he says, laughing. “They’ll say things like, ‘What is this doing to you, to sit there over a course of months editing this thing?’ It’s not really doing anything to me because I'm used to these films. You can be a normal person and still enjoy horror films.”
In Infinity Pool's case, the violence is essential. “It’s not an incredibly plot driven movie, but so much of what is there in the plot comes from this psychological metamorphosis that the characters are undertaking,” he says. “They’re bland people in a bland context. But even bland people, or maybe especially bland people, can have this animal violence and carnality to them that's repressed because we are, in fact, animals. So much of the film is about the ways that that psychology is resurfacing and mutating in this consequence-free environment. Showing it means that the audience is going to have a visceral sense of that experience.”
Wealthy people misusing their privilege seems to be in the air these days in both film and television, with shows like The White Lotus following casts of rich assholes as they make their own vacations miserable, and films like The Menu skewering the patrons and even the staff of fussy concept restaurants. Cronenberg admits it’s weird that it's coming out all at the same time, but doesn't necessarily see a pattern.
“It’s tempting to say people are frustrated and anxious because of an increasing economic divide, and everybody's worried about the future and everybody's enraged,” he allows. “I’m sure that’s true. And maybe that's fueling the success of these things. But film moves at such an incredibly glacial pace that you can't really decide to time it that way. I was doing the original writing for the story as far back as 2014, or maybe earlier. By the time you’ve written something, and then years have gone by, where you’re developing it and casting it, the actual timing of the release is completely out of your hands. It’s just sort of a weird coincidence that there's this wave of stuff coming out now.”
So, there’s no director groupchat secretly planning to drop these projects all at once?
“I can neither confirm nor deny.”
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