Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Neon/Getty
Brandon Cronenberg’s worlds, with their squelchy, gooey special effects and terrifying societal constructs, tend to stick with you long after they end.
His first feature, 2012’s Antiviral, introduces an obsessive pop culture landscape in which megafans are injected with copies of pathogens taken from celebrities so that they might feel a closer connection to them. Possessor, Cronenberg’s 2020 follow-up, features a secretive network of body-snatchers who remotely transport their consciousnesses into people close to their targets in order to kill them. Infinity Pool, which is now playing in theaters, finds Alexander Skarsgård in a fictional Eastern European country whose tourist laws forbid law enforcement from corporally punishing anyone who is just visiting. Instead, the police have the technology to grow exact clones of the wrongdoers so that they can execute them in their stead.
“I was having memories of this vacation I was on 20 years ago,” Cronenberg explains in an interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “They bussed you into this resort compound in the middle of the night, and then you lived there for a week. There was a kind of weird fake town that you’d go to, but you couldn’t actually leave the compound. And then at the end of the week, they would bus you back to the airport during the day, and you saw that the surrounding area was incredibly poverty stricken, there were people living in shacks. You realized you never actually visited the country. It was like being shipped to embassy grounds for some other tourist nation, or there was some alternate dimension that had popped up that was a weird Disneyland version of the country we’re supposedly in.”