Rising to the challenge of equaling the batshit wildness of his prior—proves an entrancing figure of entitled, cunning perversion. Sultry and nurturing, sweet and cruel, she’s the engine that powers this malignant affair as it plummets into an abyss of guises and deceptions, twisted parent-child tensions, and unholy unions.
Like all great horror directors, Cronenberg cares less about making lucid thematic or socio-political arguments than about splattering his fears, anxieties, and hang-ups onto the screen, where they can meet, intertwine, and tear apart at a moment’s notice. Infinity Pool has plenty to say but no eagerness to hold its audience’s hand; its prime motivation is to shock, confound, and overwhelm, and the writer/director once again finds a way to keep escalating the madness until, finally, it becomes outright hilarious.
That Skarsgård is so game for this sort of left-field lunacy—in which he suffers a barrage of manipulation, abuse, and humiliation—confirms that he’s one of Hollywood’s most daring leading men, as interested in eviscerating idealized masculinity as he is in embodying it.
As for Cronenberg, he’s a crazed genius of Frankensteinian symbiosis and division, smashing together disparate elements to create beautifully misshapen monsters. Consider Infinity Pool his finest atrocity to date.
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