Infinity Pool a hallucinogenic descent into sex and violence
Nothing can prepare this grisly horror film starring Alexander Skarsgard as a cashed-up foreigner in a third world country.
Infinity Pool (R18+)
In cinemas
★★★
You won’t find Li Tolqa as a holiday destination in the travel section of your favourite newspaper, which is just as well.
Canada’s chief exponent of unadulterated gore, Brandon Cronenberg, who seems to be trying to outdo his famous father, David, in the grisly horror stakes, has set his third feature, Infinity Pool, in this fictitious resort but if you see the movie you’ll never want to venture anywhere near the place.
In the film’s opening scenes we meet novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard), who, after one successful novel, now has writer’s block. James is holidaying with his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), at a plush seaside resort hotel (the film was mostly shot in Croatia). The weather is warm and the sea is blue but there are warning signs – literally – advising visitors not to venture outside the resort grounds; armed guards patrol the perimeter of the resort and the fences are made of barbed wire.
James and Em are befriended by British-accented Gabi (Mia Goth, last seen as the young murderess in Pearl) who claims to have read James’s book and loved it. Before long, James and Em join Gabi and her partner Alban (Jalil Lespert) for a meal and, next day, borrow a car and drive off for a picnic – despite the warnings about leaving the closed-off hotel grounds.
At the picnic Gabi shocks James when she brazenly performs a sexual act on him. James drives home from the picnic because Alban is too drunk. In the dark there’s an accident which has far-reaching consequences for these reckless holidaymakers.
The police, led by Detective Thresh (Thomas Kreitschmann), become involved and the visitors are introduced to some of the very peculiar laws and customs of Li Tolqa.
Until this point Infinity Pool is intriguing and interesting, though its critique of the behaviour of cashed-up foreigners in a third world country is a bit obvious. But soon Cronenberg’s predilection for excess takes over and the movie runs right off the rails becoming not only unbelievable but thoroughly unpleasant too. You may see things in this film that you’ve never seen before on screen, and you may wish afterwards that you had never seen them.
Cronenberg Jr, on the basis of his first two films, has a following and no doubt his latest gory exercise in horror will have its adherents.
It seems a shame, though, that the film’s promising first half is swamped by its second half with its hallucinogenic descent into sex and violence.
November
In cinemas
★★★★
November is a gripping film about the terrorist assault on Paris in 2015. On November 13 that year a group of nine jihadists attacked a number of locations in the French capital, including the Bataclan concert hall – where 90 music fans were murdered – a sports stadium where President Francois Hollande was in attendance, and several cafes in the 10th arrondissement.
This film, described as “fictional but based on real events”, doesn’t show the killings. Instead it opens with a scene set in Athens several months earlier in which a French anti-terrorist squad is hunting suspects but fails to catch them.
On the night of the 13th, in the sparsely populated SDAT (anti-terrorist) HQ, phones start to ring with increasing urgency, and the nightmare is underway. Seven of the terrorists were killed during the attacks but two escaped and there followed a full-scale manhunt to track them down.
The film is frenetic as it barrels along following the key anti-terrorist agents involved, who are played by a quartet of fine French actors. They are Fred (Jean Dujardin), Marco (Jeremie Renier), Ines (Anais Demoustier) and Helene (Sandrine Kiberlain), and they feverishly follow up leads that mostly lead nowhere. There is a chilling scene in which Fred interviews a surly and uncommunicative (white) man – played by Cedric Kahn – who admits that he sold the guns to the terrorists without giving a thought as to what use they would be put.
The most promising lead comes from a young Muslim woman, Samia (Lyna Khoudri), who claims that she knows where the hunted men are hiding – but her attempt at helping the authorities is at first ignored – after all the phone lines are jammed with callers offering invariably useless information of a similar nature – and later greeted with suspicion.
By concentrating on the cops, who work day and night, make mistakes, and have little contact with their families, only speaking to them briefly by phone, director Cedric Jiminez takes a deliberately one-sided view of what happened.
The film arguably could have examined in more detail the effect the killings had on ordinary Parisians. That might be the subject of another film, but Olivier Demangel’s screenplay is focused on the police and their relentless, determined hunt for the murderers. With its pounding music score (by Guillaume Roussel), sweeping camerawork (Nicolas Loir) and skilful editing (Laure Gardette), November is devastatingly effective on its chosen level.
It Is in Us All (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★½
In an early scene from Antonia Campbell-Hughes’s ambitious first feature film, It Is in Us All, Hamish Considine (Cosmo Jarvis) has flown into an Irish airport and is renting a car; the young woman serving him (Pauline Hutton) is charming and slightly flirtatious, but Hamish rudely rebuffs her. It seems at the outset that we’re in for a movie with a charmless protagonist.
It Is in Us All is an Irish production that creates an evocative, but not particularly embracing, mood of melancholia.
Soon after that airport scene Hamish, driving at night through country roads in Donegal, is involved in a head-on collision with another car, killing the 15-year-old who was apparently in the driver’s seat. Hamish suffers a fractured arm, and while he is recovering in hospital we learn more about him.
We learn that he was travelling to the isolated house where his mother and aunt had lived and which has been bequeathed to him. His father (Claes Bang) is living in Hong Kong.
It’s not long before Hamish meets Evan (Rhys Mannion), a 17-year-old who was also in the car with which he collided, but who escaped without a scratch. The two embark on a strange friendship.
Hamish also meets the dead boy’s mother, who is played by the film’s director. Hamish is a lonely, solitary man. He works for the same company as his father, but the two have little to say to one another.
It’s the friendship with Evan that dominates the film – he and Hamish go to a beachside party with some of Evan’s mates, visit his silent grandfather and even hang out in a strobe-lit dance hall. The relationship between the jaded man and the callow youth isn’t exactly sexual but nor is it a traditional friendship.
Unfortunately, Rhys Mannion’s very strong accent rendered too much of what he says incomprehensible to this reviewer.
Jarvis is very impressive as the taciturn, brooding Hamish who is clearly burdened with personal problems and grievances that threaten to destroy him. His gloomy mien perfectly complements the brooding Irish landscapes that are impressively photographed by Piers McGrail.
It Is in Us All is a rather strange, rather enigmatic film about frustrated masculinity and while it is, on several levels, an impressive debut it doesn’t quite bring to the screen a sufficiently satisfying narrative.
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