In Review: 'Infinity Pool,' 'Close'

In this week's reviews, Brandon Cronenberg visits the world outside an exclusive resort, with Cronenberg-ian results. And Belgian director Lukas Dhont looks at a teenage friendship torn asunder.

Infinity Pool
Dir. Brandon Cronenberg
117 min.

Li Tolqa is beautiful, so long as you keep a narrow view. An Eastern European country with temperate weather and beautiful beaches, its all-inclusive resorts cater to an exclusive clientele that they are encouraged—well, required, really— not to wander outside their gates. And why would they? Locals bring entertainment in the form of regional folk customs directly to vacationers who seem unfazed by the emphasis on grotesque masks (reproductions are even sold in the gift shop) and the occasional eruption of revolutionary activity is always quickly contained. Who would want to leave?

The thought doesn’t even seem to occur to the struggling writer James (Alexander Skarsgård) or his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman), whose family money is paying for the getaway. Or at least it seemingly doesn’t occur to them until they meet an intriguing new couple named Alban (Jalil Lespert) and Gabi (Mia Goth), who invite the pair to join them for a picnic on a beach away from resort property. That turns into an outing filled with sexual confusion that ends in tragedy when a drunken James hits and kills a farmer. He’s soon sentenced to death, but fortunately there’s a provision in Li Tolqa law that allows him to get away with murder — so long as he allows the authorities to make a duplicate of his body that will die in his stead.

That’s just the jumping-off point for Brandon Cronenberg’s third feature, which takes some of the themes of identity explored in its predecessor, Possessor, and runs with them to some truly dark places. Did James really watch his duplicate die or is he the duplicate? Would that explain why he feels unshackled from any sense of morality? Would that explain why he feels so good all the time? The longer he stays in Li Tolqa, the weirder it gets and the further he seems to slip away from the man he used to be.

Hallucinatory and repulsive, often both at the same time, Infinity Pool mixes horror with social satire in a way that makes it feel  like a companion piece to Triangle of Sadness, but with blood and other bodily fluids taking the place of puke and shit. It won’t, as that description suggests, be for everyone, and, like Ruben Östlund’s film, it does have a way of circling back to the same points repeatedly. But arthouse sickos should probably buy a ticket the moment they finish reading this review. Gore, politics, flesh-duplicating goo, disturbing psychedelic sex scenes, leashed men who behave like dogs: Cronenberg uses the film to offer an all-inclusive experience of his own. —Keith Phipps

Infinity Pool arrives in theaters tonight.

Close
Dir. Lukas Dhont
104 min.

[Warning: There’s an incident that occurs about 40 minutes into Close that changes what the film is about. If I were reviewing the film anywhere else, I’d probably have to write around it and that would be annoyingly vague. So the spoiler-averse can skip this review for now and see the film—which I recommend—or you can read on. It’s not like this is a whodunit.] 

Much of Lukas Dhont’s Close is photographed in shallow focus, which sharpens the intimacy between its characters while leaving the world around them a confusing and sometimes hostile blur. When we first meet Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele), two 13-year-olds who are inseparable best friends, that childhood myopia is more like a protective bubble, allowing them simply to be themselves and define the terms of their relationship. It’s only when summer ends and school begins that those terms have to be renegotiated, and the bubble is punctured to heartbreaking effect. 

Dhont catches these boys at a transitional phase of their lives, when their intimacy is still pre-sexual, but not necessarily for long and certainly not in the eyes of their new classmates, who make assumptions about Rémi napping on Léo’s stomach during recess. When Léo is asked straight up if they’re “together,” he’s completely thrown off by the question, as if it’s nothing he’d ever considered before. (Rémi is perhaps another story, though Dhont leaves his piece of the puzzle mostly to suggestion.) Within this homophobic atmosphere, the two start pulling away from each other, especially Léo, who gets involved on the youth hockey team despite his limited skating skills and works his way into a large group of kids on the playground. The boys see each other less after school, and the fallout proves too much for Rémi. 

It’s here that Close pivots on a tragedy that Dhont handles with devastating indirectness. Rémi doesn’t show up for a field trip. When the bus returns to the school, the teachers at the front of the bus take a call and give Léo a look, as parents gather outside for a hastily arranged assembly. Rémi is gone and Léo knows it—and he also feels, along with immense sadness, a direct responsibility for his friend’s death. Those emotions, grief and guilt, pulse through the remainder of Close with exceptional subtlety, pulling at Léo persistently without quite yanking him down. Dhont is smart about how such miseries are metabolized over time, how life moves on to something approaching normal and then the wounds start to ache again. This is essentially a coming-of-age movie, which means that Léo will grow around this moment like a knot on a tree trunk. 

There are times when Dhont lays it on too thick—the tears are earned, but jerked a bit vigorously in the end—but his observations about casual homophobia and the mourning process are mostly astute and the performances are exceptionally good. As Léo, Dambrine has these immensely sensitive saucer-eyes that sharpen a little as Léo's relationship with Rémi starts to falter, but he’s more guilty of conformity than cruelty. He’s still figuring things out when his friend dies. A future where they find their way back to each other is not remotely unimaginable. Dambrine makes his innocence sting. — Scott Tobias

Close opens in limited release tomorrow.