Never forget how much the super-rich despise you. Never forget that the contempt they hold you in is worse because it isn’t even deliberate. Never forget that they are so out of touch, so insulated from the rancid trauma they have unleashed for much of this century, that their loathing of the proles is largely second hand. They don’t even think enough about you to actively hate you. You aren’t even an afterthought, just a distant memory in the rear-view mirror of a class war they won when their racist, right-wing lackeys were elected to the Whitehouse, 10 Downing Street and the Palácio do Planalto.
Brandon Cronenberg’s gloriously extreme third feature, Infinity Pool never lets us forget how reprehensible the super-rich are. They descend on the fictional country of Li Tolqa to exploit the heavily guarded holiday resort like well-dressed locusts, the carcass of a nation’s dignity stripped clean. His film couldn’t be more prescient when the UK now has a prime minster so wealthy that he pays for his own helicopter flights between his constituency home and Parliament, a home that needs so much energy for its new swimming pool that the electricity grid has been upgraded to accommodate it.
The prime minister is so inoculated from the cost-of-living crisis that he doesn’t bat an eye when more than 350 public swimming pools, including one in his own constituency, are in danger of closing. His own infinite pool of money will continue to grow like a malignant cancer whilst yours shrinks to nothing, sucked dry by the Brexiteer vampires who were impervious to the stakes through the heart of the economy and shielded from the toxic rays blasted out of Murdoch’s Sun newspaper if they carried out their dread lord’s bidding.
Away from our own rotten island, the rich in Infinity Pool debate the hostile environment that lies beyond the razor wire and armed guards without a shred of irony. Li Tolqa could be anywhere and nowhere, a country no doubt exploited by capitalism and colonialism, the gates and checkpoints far more likely to protect the indigenous population from the voracious, primal urges of the rich rather than the other way round. The Li Tolqans protest on the beach, workers in the complex wear small symbols on their faces, and then Francis Bacon masks for a forthcoming festival. Their own hatred for the rich is hidden by the dutiful smiles of a people who know they will ultimately prevail.
Amongst the latest party of the over privileged to holiday in Li Tolqa is failed novelist James Foster and his Publishing House heiress wife, Em. James is a beautiful specimen of Aryan failure, a giant laid low by writer’s block, a kept man who is humiliated at every turn. Leni Riefenstahl would have despised him, Norma Desmond would have loved him. On the surface, Em seems to be the only member of the elite to be sympathetic, to possess a conscience – but she is just as cruel, “My father runs a publishing house, and the one thing he told me was to never marry a writer… But my father was also a monster. So, I married the first broke writer to spill coffee on me.”
Emasculated, James has the primitive desires of his id reawakened by his superfan Gabi Bauer, a rich actress who specialises in advertising roles where her character must have the product being sold to improve as a human being. Gabi and her husband Alban invite James and Em to party outside of the compound. Drunk on booze, Gabi’s advances and his re-emerging masculinity, James drives the foursome back to the hotel but accidentally runs over a local man and kills him. Justice and retribution in Li Tolqa are unique, the penalty for his crime is death at the hand of the dead man’s first-born son. But if you are rich there is an alternative: have a clone made and your doppelganger can be executed in your place.
And here’s the kicker. Gabi, Alban and their other cronies are actually murder tourists, through the looking glass of depravity, where their actions have no boundaries, no consequences. We’ve always known that the rich are insulated from their crimes but in Li Tolqa they are fireproof. James is orgasmic when he watches his own destruction, a panting participant in the drug fuelled, kaleidoscopic orgy of sex and violence that follows. He wantonly abandons his ego and super ego in favour of feeding his rampant id, increasingly debased in front of his richer friends who might not be fully snorting and sneering with him but at him.
Alexander Skarsgård plays James as a hulking dupe, whose bestial physicality has long since abandoned his own class to try to be accepted within the cabal of the super-rich. Whether howling on a leash or gorging himself on a bowl thick narcotic smoke, he makes the perfect foil for Mia Goth’s Gabi, once again proving herself a fearless performer as she effortlessly slips between control and hideous shrieking abandon. Just watch as she throws fried chicken from a bucket whilst riding on the bonnet of a car brandishing a gun with a fifty-foot grimace and those Bambi eyes. Just like in Pearl we can’t help but think anything else of her other than she is an absolute phenomenon.
Bombast and extremity aside, it is Infinity Pool’s, subtleties that make it work as a worthy piece of dystopian fiction. What if the doubles were swapped? Would it matter if the facsimiles were left alive and the super-rich were annihilated? Would it change anything? Is that why the Li Tolqans watch with such polite expressions. Have they successfully infiltrated the rich or did those doubles become so corrupted by the excess they have become assimilated by the greed and hatred?
Of course, the answer lies with Karl Marx, “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”
Watching Infinity Pool, you will never forget how much the super-rich despise you.