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Infinity Pool

Brandon Cronenberg · 2023

OVERVIEW

Brandon Cronenberg's 2023 film. A writer at a walled resort in a fictional country kills a local in a road accident and learns that the state will execute a cloned copy of him in his place, for a fee, with the original required to watch.

The premise turns tourism into a machine for consequence-free repetition, and the film is built on doubling: of people, of images, of scenes.

WHY IT MATTERS

Luxury environments destabilized by violence, repetition and identity fracture.

CONTEXT

Shot in Croatia and Hungary. The resort is generic by design, the country invented, the currency and language unplaceable. That vagueness is the argument rather than a shortcut.

It makes a trilogy of sorts with Possessor: both are about a self that can be copied, rented or worn, and both treat the apparatus as mundane.

WHAT TO NOTICE

  1. 01The wallAlmost every exterior establishes a boundary between resort and country. The film never lets you forget which side of it a scene is on.
  2. 02Doubling in the frameMirrors, reflections in pools, symmetrical compositions. The visual grammar prepares the plot device before it arrives.
  3. 03MasksThe local ritual masks are the only ornament in a film otherwise made of blank surfaces, and they are used to strip identity rather than express it.
  4. 04Luxury with nothing in itThe resort is expensive and characterless. The production design is doing the same job as the invented country.

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