In Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, the sex and satire drip off the screen

polygon.com:

This review was originally published in conjunction with Infinity Pool ’s premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. It has been updated for the movie’s streaming release.

Infinity Pool is the best horror-satire about Americans (and Brits, and one Austrian) abroad since Hostel. The hype surrounding the movie focuses on the depravity on display in Brandon Cronenberg’s follow-up to 2020’s Possessor, which is fair: The squibs are juicy, the nudity is full-frontal, and the psychedelic orgy sequence is extended. But there’s a trenchant point to all the blood, sex, and urine.

On the fictional island nation of La Tolqua, guests of the Pa Qlqa Pearl Princess resort are forbidden to venture outside the barbed-wire gates of the “compound.” And why would they? Pa Qlqa is a beachside paradise with its own Chinese restaurant and Bollywood dance performances. In the world of Infinity Pool, it’s a simulacrum of the world that allows tourists to feel like they’re getting an “international experience” without having to interact with anyone who doesn’t speak English. It’s the ideal tourist economy, everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Stripping a place of its identity inevitably leads to stripping its people of humanity as well. That’s the appeal for a darker subset of Pa Qlqa regulars, who come to the island specifically to take advantage of a rule that allows foreigners to get away with any of the many crimes that carry the death penalty in La Tolqua. Blasphemy, drug possession, murder — all capital crimes, and all of them forgivable for the right price. (This is such a common practice, there’s an ATM in the police headquarters specifically for withdrawing payoffs.) This allows Americans like Gabi (Mia Goth), Alban (Jalil