‘Infinity Pool’ proves Brandon Cronenberg follows father’s footsteps

• Brandon is the progeny of David Cronenberg.
• David Cronenberg is the renowned king of body horror in Hollywood.
• Brandon is adopting his father’s preferred established cinematic jargon.

In some circles, ‘Infinity Pool’ featured Brandon Cronenberg’s entry was greeted with, shall we say, expectations when he originally came onto the scene with his studiously eerie debut Antiviral. Among other things, Brandon is the progeny of David Cronenberg, the renowned king of body horror who created classics like The Fly, Dead Ringers, Scanners, and others. However, even a 10-minute short like “Please Speak Continuously And Describe Your Experiences As They Come To You” established the younger Cronenberg as a director with a distinctly different style from his father’s.

Looking back on Antiviral, it was evident even then that Brandon was adopting his father’s preferred established cinematic jargon. Since they both have a predominating interest in sterile, uncontaminated corporate interiors, sex as emancipation, and the viscous, gooey, repulsive aspect of what occurs when a human body, that weakest of machines, fails itself, it seems to reason that the two are similar in these respects. Although it should be evident that this is not only an incorrect interpretation but also completely reductive, more harsh critics might charge Brandon Cronenberg with coasting on the significant influence of his father’s legacy without actually contributing anything new.

In other words, Brandon Cronenberg is fiercely talented, totally unique, and bound to stick around. Antiviral made an astounding debut, foreshadowing the doom of something like the COVID-19 pandemic to a degree that no one could have foreseen back in 2012 when the movie first began to play in festivals. Possessor, Cronenberg’s gorier, bloodier follow-up, demonstrated that Antiviral was no aberration and was one of the most memorable and revolting films to be released in 2020. Like his father, the younger Cronenberg displays an openly fetishistic fascination with the intersections between the ancient and the new body.

Although his work is not for the faint of heart, Brandon Cronenberg has already established himself as one of the more interesting stylists working in genre cinema today with just three features to his credit. He is the only individual who could ever carry his father’s flame in so many ways.

But does Brandon Cronenberg even want to continue on his father’s legacy? He has unquestionably inherited particular subject interests as well as the expectations that come with having a particular family name. Even more ruthless, transgressive, and provocative than Possessor or the relatively restrained Antiviral is Brandon’s latest work, Infinity Pool, which offers him his largest canvas to date. It is a vile, venomously hypnotic feast of degradation, strobe-lit orgies, horrifying ritualistic masks, and anatomically imaginative carnage.

What we have here is a movie that appears to be made with the intention of making anyone who had second thoughts about either of the director’s previous two films dash for the exits in search of barf bags. Infinity Pool is everything you would wish for and anticipate from a movie bearing the Cronenberg family name, but it’s also much more than that, as we’ll try to explain in the following paragraphs. Hopefully, this will make the younger Cronenberg more than just his father’s heir apparent.

There is an outwardly aggressive, immersively tactile filmmaking energy in his son’s work that is never anything less than a thrill to behold, even if David Cronenberg’s movies have become more cerebral and contemplative over time (see: last year’s Crimes of the Future, which is almost mellow by the standards of the guy who gave the world Naked Lunch).

Infinity Pool is concerned with the unsettling autonomy that results from crossing the line separating 90% of humanity from the depraved and the demented, the loathsomely privileged, and the completely psychopathic. If Possessor was fixated on the complications of inhabiting a psyche other than our own, and Antiviral was partly about how sickness distances us from both our bodies and our minds, then Infinity Pool was concerned with the complications of crossing that line. It’s a bracingly perverse movie that feels both totally natural to have been directed by a member of the Cronenberg family and unlike anything the elder Cronenberg could have ever created alone.

Brandon is working with possibly his most talented ensemble to date in this film, and it is undeniable that the performances he extracts from lead Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgard are primal, animalistic, horrifying, and beautiful to witness. James Foster is portrayed by Skarsgrd, who continues his successful record of collaborating with eccentric, boundary-pushing auteurs like Robert Eggers and Jeremy Saulnier. James is a lousy novelist who published one book that received negative reviews six years before to the start of Infinity Pool and has yet to produce a sequel.

The fact that James married into wealth when he met the devoted, seemingly well-adjusted Em should also be addressed (Cleopatra Coleman). When we first meet them, the two are on vacation on the isolated, made-up island of Li Tolqa, where the beautiful, opulent surroundings of the couple are imagined with an unsettling, frigid undertow.

Infinity Pool is ultimately a movie about how wealth allows you to behave in any horrifying, dehumanising way you wish to, and while David Cronenberg’s cinema has always been more casually observant in its politics than many who would simply throw the term “body horror” at his filmography would ever be willing to admit, he’s never confronted class consciousness. This is one area where the younger Cronenberg’s interests diverge significantly from those of his father.

We’re here to say that it’s high time we started respecting Brandon Cronenberg as his own artist, and not just as David Cronenberg’s son. It’s not hard to see how being nurtured in part by the man who brought the world Crash (1996) would impact one’s own artistic sensibilities.

One could argue that David Cronenberg has already experienced the confrontational edge and gross-out factor of his son’s work, and Brandon Cronenberg is too young, talented, and hungry to be making a movie like Crimes of the Future, which feels like a satirical artistic manifesto from one of our dark elder statesmen. The only person who could create a movie like Infinity Pool is Brandon Cronenberg. What’s best? He seemed to be just getting warmed up.

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