A blend of horror and science fiction, Infinity Pool is director Brandon Cronenberg’s third feature-length film. An unrated cut debuted at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, this year and was one of the most disturbing and unsettling films shown. Shot in Croatia and Hungary, Cronenberg said the film was inspired by memories of a vacation he took a long time ago.

In an interview posted on Jan. 31, Cronenberg was quoted as explaining to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed that Infinity Pool was inspired by memories of a resort vacation he took over 20 years ago. He said:

Infinity Pool follows a semi-successful novelist, James (Alexander Skarsgård), and his wealthy wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), during their stay at an isolated resort on the fictional island of Li Tolqa. James meets the seductive, sociopathic Gabi (Mia Goth), who invites the couple to take a day trip away from the resort with her and her husband, Alban (Jalil Lespert), even though they have been warned that tourists are to remain on the resort compound at all times. After eating, drinking, and relaxing at the beach, James offers to drive an inebriated Alban back to the resort. He accidentally runs over a local farmer, killing him. Gabi insists that they cannot call the Li Tolqa PD because the country is corrupt, and a horrified James and Em follow her ruthless lead and return to the hotel as if nothing happened.

I was having memories of this vacation I was on 20 years ago. 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.

The next day, James and Em are arrested on charges of murder, and James is convicted. Li Tolqa has a zero-tolerance policy for crime, and the penalty for murder is death at the hands of the murdered person’s firstborn son. However, the country’s tourist laws forbid law enforcement from corporally punishing visitors to the island, creating a loophole that some rich tourists exploit. If convicted of a crime, wealthy visitors have a second option available: they can be cloned and then have the clone of themselves be executed in their stead. Em pays for James to be cloned so that the clone can be executed, and the things that happen to James in the movie only get more horrific.

Infinity Pool’s Violence May Not Be For Everyone, But It’s Essential

     Neon Pictures

Although Cronenberg acknowledges the amount of violence in Infinity Pool may not be for everyone, he said in The Daily Beast interview that it is essential to the message he is trying to convey. He told the interviewer:

Infinity Pool is currently playing in theaters.

The plot comes from this psychological metamorphosis that the characters are undertaking. They’re bland people in a bland context. But even bland people, or maybe especially bland people, can have this animal violence and carnality to them that’s repressed because we are, in fact, animals. So much of the film is about the ways that psychology is resurfacing and mutating in this consequence-free environment.