I wasn’t as into Possesor as I thought I’d be, but I’m still going to check this out. Some of the shots in the trailer are framed in a really cool way.
Man, this looks pretty nuts - maybe not as nuts as Possessor or Antiviral but I’m sure it will be worth a watch. I wonder what dinner table conversation was like at the Cronenberg household.
I’ve had a few awkward dinners where I wish I could’ve pulled off this trick and blown my brains out with a Poult 45.
ε/̵͇̿̿/’̿’̿ ̿(◡︵◡)
Also, I don’t know where Mia Goth came from but it seems like she’s everywhere all of a sudden.
This trailer is chock full of WTF. I really liked Possessor, so I don’t see how I could resist this.
Well, they can’t all be Possessors or Antivirals. :/
I did like it, though. Just not as much as Cronenberg’s earlier movies. I think part of the issue is that I’m really not buying Alexander Skarsgard lately. After a string of dud roles, he felt too slight for Robert Eggers’ Viking Hamlet, and now I’m wondering if he’s too slight for the sort of brain-busting role he plays in Infinity Pool. What’s eventually revealed about his character is perfect – chef’s kiss, almost! – but I wasn’t buying some of the places he stopped along the way. Mia Goth, however? Hoo boy, she’s the banana in the milkshake: a little goes a long way. I’m not sure Infinity Pool benefits from unfettered Mia Goth the way Pearl did, but she’s still fun to watch. I’m guessing she can be a real handful for a director!
I also think some of the mindfuckery in this Brandon Cronenberg movie is editing cheats. I don’t recall feeling that way about anything in Possessor, although that movie was similarly hand-wavey about the mechanics of what was going on. But I never felt misled in Possessor, at least not the way I did here.
Anyyway, thumbs up from me, but I’d have preferred another lead actor. Was Bill not available?
I could watch Mia Goth cut bread all day.
After the first part of the movie, when you finally see the first bit of sci-fi and the movie could go in any number of directions, I was really hoping for more of a “Think like a dinosaur” vibe. On the other hand, I guess we already have The Prestige.
This is an interesting film in the moment you’re watching it, but I have no idea why anyone acted the way they did. Maybe it’s a failure on my part to think that if someone can live a life without consequence they don’t have to turn into an incredibly evil asshole. Just because someone could act like these terrible people I’d like to think they still wouldn’t. This is where the whole exploration of what it means to make a perfect copy of someone comes in - if you make a copy of yourself with perfect memory, then that is someone who’s learned from the same experiences, and should act in the same way. I see no excuse why even if the original James was murdered why his clone (if that’s the open question in the movie) would act amorally.
At the end of the movie suddenly everyone else reverts back to normal, almost horribly boring and mundane life?
I’ll definitely keep watching Cronenberg’s films - they’ve all been really interesting and worth the time, but I think Possessor is still my favorite of the 3.
Don’t have to, but experience, and this film, suggests many do.
I guess it’s technically an open question, but the film kind of loses interest in it early on and I don’t think it ultimately matters. They act immorally because they can (and at least in James’s case by being made complicit in it early on). Whether it’s OG James or a clone (or a clone of a clone), they don’t give any humanity to the other one.
There’s a long line of fiction about supposedly decent people who turn increasingly bad when they don’t have to bear the consequences of their actions, and there are innumerable real life examples of tourists from wealthy countries who visit third world and figure laws and social norms don’t apply to them.
In that respect Infinity Pool seemed realistic.