With the Halloween season in full swing, I love that streaming services are pushing out horror movies left and right. As an avid, self-proclaimed horror movie snob: this is the best time of year! I have been watching about three or four movies a week since I got hooked on the Saw franchise in September, and I have not been able to stop. After watching ten installments of a single franchise in less than two weeks (I love you, Saw <3), I have needed a few pallet cleansers; one being the original Hellraiser and The Silence of the Lambs. Both of these classics blew my mind with their plot, effects, and cinematography. I had a lot of fun watching them. Let’s talk about one that was a little less fun!
Spoilers ahead for Infinity Pool; I’m not sure if you wanted to watch it, anyway. Peace and love, here are the content warnings. Strong themes of sexual assault are discussed further in this article, read with caution and protect yourself always.
I trust the Cronenberg family, okay? I am a firm believer in body horror being some of the best horror that is out there, and the use of practical effects is something that will always shake me to my core when it comes to the surge of creativity that some people are able to possess. David Cronenberg’s The Fly is one of my favorite movies of all time, and it is what propelled me to watch his son, Brandon Cronenberg’s film Possessor a while back; it’s super cool, but definitely relies heavily on glitchy, jolted editing sequences for its cinematography. These editing sequences reminded me a lot of the earlier Saw movies, which are effective in creating a world that feels out of control.
This is what allowed me to give Infinity Pool a chance, as I had heard it was a trip from the very beginning. Mia Goth is awesome and the Skarsgårds are awesome, so I was all in. My bestie Grace (fellow Her Campus writer) warned me that the body horror is something else, but that only made me want to watch it more. I wish I had taken her warning a bit more seriously, as I didn’t think it had so much to do with sexuality and its implications on the characters included in the story.
Let me get this off my chest: I have a certain thing about sexuality and how it is depicted in film, especially in horror movies. I know certain things are artsy and there are choices to be made when it comes to using sex as a device for character development, but it felt like Infinity Pool completely downplayed how Mia Goth’s character, Gabi, sexually assaults James at the beginning of the film by touching him without consent and then coerces him into a gigantic orgy while he’s under the influence of drugs and alcohol. It just wasn’t cool with me, and even when you add all the artsy editing, naked bodies, and weird tones in the background, I don’t know if it was needed, or at least for that duration of time. Was it to show how inebriated James was (which could have been achieved in significantly less sex on-screen), or were we all just looking at boobies?
As for the plot, I was disappointed when the concept of the infinity pool itself was only played with a couple of times during the entire film. Maybe I missed something, but the idea of the infinity pool as a metaphor for the amount of deaths could have been really cool. It just felt like a way for James to sit and reflect on what had happened, but it didn’t have a major effect on the plot. Why call the movie Infinity Pool?
I went searching for answers, because I didn’t want to just sit in this negativity. I found that Brandon Cronenberg spoke about the ending of the film and themes of identity, saying “It’s more about what makes someone a continuous human. Is a person singular, is a person continuous, or are these things more messy than that?” The idea of a human life being the infinity pool, in this case James’s continuous deaths, is good enough a metaphor for me to accept.
Let’s talk about how the entire movie is about how Mia Goth’s character, Gabi, is grooming James into joining her group of tourist friends that kill themselves and others for fun, and then gets mad when James chooses life. She, at the end of the film, is depicted to audiences as an abuser; causing James to not only die several times, but continually cheat on his wife, and beat himself up twice. Girl, damn! This is starting to remind me of how The Brood was inspired by David Cronenberg’s divorce; with all due respect, what the hell happened to you, Brandon, to make Gabi breastfeed James? In another interview, Cronenberg admits that he was inspired by “a bizarre vacation to the Dominican Republic in which he was bused into a resort that was surrounded by a razor-wire fence in the dead of night.” I don’t know if this justifies all that, buddy!
It was just a trip, and not in a good way. A good example of a trippy horror movie that I have enjoyed recently is The Barbarian, which just kept going crazy. I am just a sucker for practical effects, and I am sorry that my bias has affected the way I see the body horror in Infinity Pool: the rapid editing is good to show the discontent with the environment, but not to make an artsy porno in the middle of a horror movie where the character is being assaulted. I feel like there are ways to depict assault in a horror movie without glorifying it, but perhaps glorifying it is the horror of it all, anyway. I personally can’t find that enjoyable to watch and don’t want to. Some things are a lot different than watching someone run away from a serial killer, and I think this is one of them.
All this to say, I did have a… time watching Infinity Pool. I could not look away, even though I was really tired and it was late at night. It had me on the edge of my seat, full of confusion and discomfort. Maybe that was the goal after all, but I’m not sure if I am the real Erin anymore. Effective horror movie! Less sexual assault would be dope, though.