Four Bodies, Three Urns: Infinity Pool (2023)
Credit: Film Forge/Elevation Pictures/4film/Hero Squared/Telefilm Canada/Eurimages/The Croatian Audiovisual Centre/Celluloid Dreams. Distributed by: Elevation Pictures
Everyone seems to agree that Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool (2023) is pitch-perfect social satire, and everyone also seems to agree that it is more than just satire. The question is what else is it? While the film can be riffed on philosophically as much as sociologically, a puzzling scene at its end underscores how psychologically rich Infinity Poolis.
Film Overview
Infinity Pool follows writer James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) as they visit a resort in the fictional country of La Tolqa. La Tolqa is a developing nation with something of a post-communist, Eastern European vibe. James is a struggling novelist hoping to find inspiration for his next book, while Em appears to be losing patience with his professional and financial stagnancy.
Things change when James meets Gabi (a stunningly good Mia Goth), a fan of his work, and her husband, Alban (Jalil Lespert). The next day, although guests are strictly forbidden from leaving the resort grounds, James and Em join Gabi and Alban for a seaside picnic. That night, while driving home quite drunk, James hits and kills a local farmer.
This is where things get interesting: the penalty for James is death, though La Tolqa has a unique law: for a substantial fee, foreign visitors may pay to have a clone or “duplicate” made that can die in their place. After agreeing, James is forced to witness the murder of his doppelganger before taking home its ashes in an urn—a “souvenir,” as the corrupt offer who brokered the deal, Detective Thresh (Thomas Kretschmann), says.
Upon returning to the resort, Em is horrified and quickly plans to leave. Meanwhile, secretly titillated by the murder, James accidently-on-purpose loses his passport. Reconnecting with Gabi, he is then introduced to a cabal of Western tourists who have all had doubles killed in their place after being convicted of various offenses. As the film progresses, James joins the group and enters a period of hazy, surreal depravity characterized by hallucinogenic drugs, sexual promiscuity, home invasion, and violence.
What Does it Mean?
As social satire, Infinity Pool is razor sharp. It nails the arrogance, condescension, and entitlement characteristic of a certain thread of developed nations. It’s hard to imagine what would be a greater vehicle for indulgence than spinning off doppelgangers to take the fall for you in a country that has been pressed by financial pressures to relax its moral and legal boundaries.
The film briefly hints at the broader philosophical implications of the duplicates. While this is pretty well-worn territory (e.g., How do we know which duplicate was the “real” James? Who or what is the “real” James? Does it matter?), the film’s choice to connect that classic form of pulpy sci-fi philosophizing to contemporary social class is a clever twist. Still, its delivery might outstrip its successes in its treatment of those hoary (yet irritatingly persistent) ontological and existential questions.
To me, the film’s psychological undertones were more central. Indeed, I was a little surprised when writing in The Atlantic, David Sims suggested that James was so empty that cloning him was akin to “dividing zero” (nice turn of phrase, though). While I like the idea of pushing the cynicism of the film’s satire to that extreme, I didn’t quite experience it that way.
For example, the film’s psychoanalytic undertones were overt (e.g., stabbing with knives, knives getting bigger, themes of sexual repression/indulgence, etc.). The most obvious connection here would be the figure of the double itself, which dates back to Freud’s reflections on the uncanny and has been thoroughly theorized by a variety of psychoanalytic thinkers. The exact terms differ, but in a general sense, psychoanalysis treats the double as a reflection of unacknowledged parts of oneself. This self-disavowal is what gives the double the uncanny characteristic of seeming both familiar and unfamiliar. In the case of the double, it is of course parts of oneself e.g., taboo desires, painful personal truths, past stages of one’s psychological development, etc.). that one is denying or suppressing, so they’re bound to seem eerily familiar.
Doubtless some skilled undergrad somewhere is writing a term paper that provides a psychoanalytic reading of the film, and perhaps we can leave that work to them. Moving on, beyond the more overtly psychoanalytic insights, the film tracks a fairly clear trajectory in James’s psychological growth. Really, you could make the case that the film lays it on a little thick: the metaphor of having James literally fight himself might be a little heavy-handed, as is the final scene in which Gabi nurses a “reborn” James who can now shed his “larval” mind after learning “the type of creature he is” (nursing him with the blood of one of the duplicates, no less).
Infinity Pool gives us three clear cases where James directly or indirectly arranges for the murder of a duplicate. In the first case, he simply witnesses the murder of the duplicate after he’s been arrested for killing the farmer. In the second case, he takes a more active role in fostering the conditions that lead to the murder of the duplicate (a point gleefully acknowledged by Alban, who didn’t know James “had it in him”), though he doesn’t directly kill the duplicate himself. For those keeping track, the murder of this second duplicate is undertaken as a penalty for the cabal’s home invasion and subsequent murder of a local developer. Finally, by the point of reaching the murder of the third duplicate, James is compelled to kill the double himself when he beats to death a particularly feral duplicate that Gabi calls “The Dog.”
Four Bodies, Three Urns
So, the film directly presents the death of three duplicates of James: the first is killed after James hits the farmer, the second is killed after the cabal is arrested for home invasion, and the third is The Dog.
The film shows Thresh giving James an urn after the first duplicate is killed, and that first urn is visible on the counter when the film shows him returning to the resort with the second urn. Two urns. Yet, at the end of the film, James is shown with three urns, which the camera emphasizes for us by lingering on them in James’s luggage as he prepares to go home.
On a first pass, this seems appropriate: three duplicates of James have been killed, James is shown being given the ashes of the first two, and thus it makes sense that the third urn obviously reflects the murder of The Dog. The message is clear, but the practical mechanics behind how James came to have the third urn are less obvious. In the first two cases, an urn is provided by the La Tolqa state after a duplicate is murdered at the police station. However, James kills The Dog with his own hands in front of a farmhouse in a rural area.
The question then is how and why the La Tolqa state elected to retrieve and immolate the body of The Dog (again, the third duplicate of James). The design of the urn is unmistakably that of the first two, but the film doesn’t show James going to the police station to retrieve a third urn. So, where did it come from?
Two Explanations for the Third Urn
As I see it, there are two explanations for how James came to have the third urn. The first would be to see The Dog as the same duplicate as that which the group tricks James into fighting earlier in the film. In that scene, the tourist cabal drugs and deceives James into thinking they have kidnapped Detective Thresh, who they suggest is keeping James’s passport from him (though the film of course implies that James always knew where his passport was, which indicates an interesting willingness to self-deceive on his part).
This would seem to make the most sense: as Gabi suggests, the tourist cabal paid Thresh a little extra to make an additional duplicate of James to play a trick on him. In that scene, after seeing he’s been beating and urinating on a duplicate of himself rather than Thresh, James runs out of the room, and the duplicate’s fate isn’t made clear. Picking up where those events left off, presumably after James beat The Dog to death, Thresh must have then immolated the body to once more clean up after the spoiled tourists. This is the most likely explanation, and it would clear up the question of what happened to the extra duplicate the cabal had paid Thresh to produce.
Still, I admit to favoring a second explanation. In this version, James got arrested after murdering The Dog. The Dog might still have been the duplicate that the tourist cabal had Thresh produce; however, the ashes would be from another duplicate of James that the La Tolqa state would have required be killed in his place for his crime of having murdered The Dog. Thus, in this version, there were four duplicates total (the one killed after the death of the farmer, the one killed after the home invasion, The Dog, and the fourth that took James’s place after getting arrested for killing The Dog).
What I like about this interpretation is that it complicates the psychological progression we mentioned above. Think about it: the scene in which James sheds his “larval mind” by killing The Dog ends with Gabi nursing the metaphorically reborn James who has now actively taken a hand in murdering a duplicate. The fourth double would be a byproduct of the final, conclusive murder that is supposed to mark James’s rebirth. Thus, this fourth duplicate doesn’t fit neatly into the psychological progression outlined above—if James has been reborn through the succession of the first three murders, then the fourth duplicate would be a type of excess wreckage caused by this bloody process of self-realization. It’s a hanging remainder of unfortunate carnage that can’t be sublated.
Conclusion
From what I can tell, the film doesn’t provide evidence to support one interpretation over the other. However, what I like about the second one is that it indicates the ineluctably incomplete quality of our psychological development. In this rendering, personal development isn’t just violent and harrowing—it’s also always a little partial, with a sort of metaphorical body somehow always missing. In this way, the film’s handling of the fourth body highlights the inevitable remainder that is left behind when we aspire to be a better realized entity.
Thus, aside from its incisive social criticism and shaggy philosophizing, Infinity Pool underscores the troubling truth that there is always a certain hanging thread left behind by our attempts to resolve the disjuncture at the center of our psychological makeup.
Four bodies, three urns.