In the Flesh: Infinity Pool (Patreon)

“Do you know why duplication exists only in La Tolqa?” asks Dr. Modan (John Ralston), smiling impishly. “It’s something about their sense of poetry. We’ve tried to recreate the technique, but we’re far too literal.” This sort of wink-and-grin dialogue flirts with overexplanation, but it’s perfectly suited to the queasy, dissociative nightmare world writer/director Brandon Cronenberg conjures in Infinity Pool. Stymied writer James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) and his rich wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) languish poolside in an antiseptic resort compound on an impoverished island ruled by a fascist, theocratic police force. The island, La Tolqa, functions as a metaphor for conservatism as a tool employed by the elite for their own hypocritical ends, a place where laws exist to torture and placate the poor and to finance the infrastructure the rich abuse in their twisted vacation crime sprees.

Duplication is the process of creating a physically and emotionally identical copy of a convicted criminal, then executing the copy to technically satisfy La Tolqa’s draconian legal system. Only the very wealthy can afford duplication, which makes the rich de facto immune to the consequences of their actions while vacationing on the island. Cronenberg has a field day with the process itself, further developing his own distinct visual language of body horror with crumpled torsos inflating amid flashing lights and hovering geometric shapes. There is a cold, depersonalizing element to all the film’s body horror, a sense that the last thing wealth turns us against is ourselves, that once the rich have fenced out the poor and the malformed and all the other manifold faces of the Other, they inevitably begin to see reflections of those absences in themselves.

Embodied by gruesomely deformed La Tolqan ritual masks implied to have been cast from imperfectly grown duplicates, this dissociative attitude leads James to join a marauding gang of “zombies”, other men and women who’ve been duplicated and witnessed their own executions. Wealth here has rendered even physical personhood debatable, a source of ennui for morally bankrupt playboys to obsess over while staring at the sea. Cronenberg does some of his best work filming the Croatian coast, capturing windblown waves with such a lack of visual depth that they come to resemble television static, a seething field of visual noise in which patterns emerge, split, and are subsumed into a greater essential chaos. Infinity Pool may lack the tightness and laser focus of Possessor, but it more than compensates with astounding effects and a rich, curious thematic scope.