Of all the deranged images in Infinity Pool, there was one that became catnip to a certain sect of filmgoers months before its release: the sight of Alexander Skarsgård, that famously Adonic Swede, crawling around on all fours, bound by a leash and glaring maniacally into the distance.
The film's premiere at Sundance only fuelled the imperishable flames of a thousand hungry genre fans. Skarsgård, ever the red carpet renegade, once again donned a dog collar, headline after headline reporting on the sartorial choice with febrile breathlessness.
People even showed up to screenings in their own – surely uncomfortable – canine cosplay.
You can't help but imagine director Brandon Cronenberg sitting in a dark room somewhere, rubbing his hands together at this exercise in public humiliation.
Perversion, after all, is the propulsive force driving Infinity Pool – and the temptation to which every character succumbs in this orgiastic feast of a film. It's brutal and bacchanalian in equal measure.
We meet Skarsgård's James in a half-conscious fog as he's waking up from a night of restless dreams. He's been muttering something about brain death in his sleep – certainly a harbinger of doom.
There's a long-running friction between James and his wife Em (the Australian actor Cleopatra Coleman) that colours their stay at a luxury resort in the far-flung, fictional nation of Li Tolqa.
They've come to this place to decamp from their marital woes. He's a writer who no longer writes: It's been six years since his last novel, and he's spent the intervening time trying – and failing – to overcome a terminal case of creative block, all the while bankrolled by Em and her wealthy father.
Perhaps the pristine, edgeless surfaces of this resort – as the title suggests – could calm the troubled waters of their relationship.
But we already know how this tale goes.
Infinity Pool, almost immediately, conjures the dozens of holidays-gone-wrong from the past two years of film and television. Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, and The White Lotus are but a handful of examples from a list so extensive they could comprise their own genre.
It means Cronenberg's set-up feels slightly stale on arrival – even if his treatment of this tourist trap is remarkably queasier than his peers'.
Just minutes into the film, the camera starts careening at bizarro angles. We gaze into the vaulting rafters of a cabana – ivory striations against a beaming blue sky – as our view lurches precariously, like an amusement park ride from hell. It's enough to make even the most iron-clad stomach seasick.
The effect is shorthand for the sheer weirdness that's about to erupt – beginning with the arrival of one Mia Goth, cinema's reigning scream queen, whose presence always telegraphs a turn to the macabre.
Fresh from a rabidly acclaimed turn in last year's Pearl as a murderous ingenue harbouring screen ambitions, Goth plays another actor: the coquettish Gabi, a regular vacationer in Li Tolqa along with her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert).
Infinity Pool shrewdly lets Goth keep her natural accent: a treacly British lilt whose girlish inflections barely conceal more sinister intentions. At a chance run-in on the resort grounds, Gabi fawns over James's novel – his one and only admirer.
Before long, the two couples are dancing together under woozy neon lights that shimmer and shudder, and taking joyrides down to a secluded inlet some distance away.
Their daylong excursion to the beach is also an act of petty mischief: Their resort is fenced in and guarded by armed militia, with foreign visitors strictly prohibited from leaving the grounds.
Such hefty security measures seem, at first, a quirk of the foreign landscape. Filmed across Hungary and Croatia, Li Tolqa is given a menacing otherness by its runic alphabet and its peculiar rituals – including a festival marking the impending monsoon season, featuring horror-movie masks complete with puckering, melting skin.
"This is not a civilised place," Gabi moans at one point.
As has become standard for this genre of holiday horror, though, it's not the wealthy elite who need protecting from the locals – but the other way around.
By the time their sunny sojourn is over, night has fallen. An intoxicated James offers to drive back, and the inevitable occurs: In the darkness, he strikes and kills a passing villager, whose battered corpse Cronenberg lingers on with depraved fascination.
James's misdeed, as it turns out, is punishable in this country by death.
There's a loophole, however, available for tourists and diplomats: a convenient bit of legislation where foreign criminals can fork over a hefty sum to be cloned, then watch on as their doppelgänger is dealt with in their place.
So it is that James comes to witness his own execution, the slightest smirk dawning across his face while his double writhes and yowls in agony.
As Em pulls away, disgusted, from the whole sordid affair, James spirals deeper into Gabi's vortex, meeting her clan of fellow tourists – all of them self-professed "zombies" who kill and pillage for sport, having each discovered the same legal loophole on vacations past.
It sets off a sequence of events so carnal that Infinity Pool risks desensitising us to its most gruesome spectacles. Bodily fluids – of all varieties – fill the screen so often that they feel almost rote.
By the time James – or is it his clone? – is slobbering on a leash, we hardly blink an eye. A little role-play never hurt anybody, did it?
Cronenberg, throughout, remains steadfast to the idiosyncratic grotesqueries he's developed over his first two features – especially 2020's Possessor, another body swap thriller. In both Possessor and Infinity Pool, he exhibits a startling command of the grisly – often conveyed in psychedelic sequences of prosthetic faces dissolving and squishing in some kind of corporeal fantasia.
(There's nothing more horrifying than a shot of James preparing for his doubling procedure, eyes bulging and teeth bared like a nightmarish Wallace and Gromit.)
The stylistic flair should come as no surprise, perhaps, given Cronenberg's body horror pedigree. Both he and his father David share a preoccupation with flesh and its destruction.
The elder Cronenberg's work, however, is markedly warmer in tone: His best work, from the 1996 classic Crash to his latest feature, 2022's Crimes of the Future, feels delightfully offbeat, even janky. The characters in both those films are genuine oddballs consumed by eccentric fixations; it just so happens that those fixations entail mutilation.
For Cronenberg junior, the violence is the point. As the barbarity escalates towards a screeching finale, Infinity Pool remains curiously devoid of humanity – a chasm of empathy that grows wider with each sadistic manoeuvre.
It's an interesting experiment, and – in all its lurid, bloody pageantry – certainly a spectacle to behold.
But it might ring a little too hollow. Like the body of water in its title, Infinity Pool is cool to the touch and visually arresting – though whether there's anything beneath the surface is up for debate.
Infinity Pool is in cinemas now.
