Infinity Pool (2023)
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
James and Em travel to a luxurious resort in an obscure foreign country to help James find ideas for his next novel. It’s been six years since his debut, so when flirtatious fan Gabi invites them to dinner with her husband, James accepts, and the foursome soon find themselves outside the resort driving to a deserted beach in a rented car. On the way back, James drives into a local farmer, killing them, and the local police explain that the penalty for doing that is death… but if they can afford it, the police can make a clone of James, and the clone can be killed instead.
It’s wonderful that the films of father and son are in conversation with each other. Crimes of the Future is about a man’s desire to use his natural generative energy (aka organs) for art. Infinity Pool is about the price a man will pay to escape the despair of writer’s block. Gabi switches from seductive to direct to monstrous in the blink of an eye, which is at times very funny, and like us James is transfixed.
At the start, Em half-jokes that she is with the creatively impotent James because of daddy issues, but James has far more destructive mother issues, swapping the financially supportive but emasculating Em for the manipulative Gabi who demands James prove his strength though ever more dangerous acts. His self-destructive nature meets its match in someone who wants to test him to destruction.