timwburke

Infinity Pool examines of the impact that wealth has on the psyche, and it doesn’t bring any new revelations. The acting is great. Direction is competent. There are two montage segments that needed shortening. Somehow it makes sex with Mia Goth boring. The ending leaves you bleak and gutted.

Writer/director Branden Cronenberg made Antiviral, which had a great premise with a confusing crime plot, and Possessor which is frigging great all the way around. Both deal with the impact technology has on identity and social responsibility. It seems Cronenberg breaks new ground here, but doesn’t provide a new path.

Infinity Pool takes wealthy tourists in a fictitious Balkan nation, allows them to bribe their way out of murders while specially created clones take their punishment. Obviously, it plays more as parable than plausible. Unlike his other movies, Infinity Pool adds nothing to their examinations. What would I change?

“Infinity Pool” would make a neat premise for the next Marvel Deadpool movie. Wade gets a blood transfusion from Lobo. Whenever Wade fights, he bleeds new Deadpools, all of them hostile wiseasses. He would enlist incredibly dangerous, absurd characters to try to wrangle the clones. Eventually, he gets help from someone telepathic to control them, then does some genetic handwavium to reset his blood, and no one learns anything. Damn thing writes itself.

Seriously…. What would I have done? First: the movie leaves you angry at economic disparity and despairing over human corruption. It keeps the story tight and close, over a month’s time following the downfall of a single protagonist. Cool. It really hits its marks there. I’d leave its intentions alone.

The problem is that “clones” are a well-worn idea. Could the author pay to create a hitman and kill the other tourists? He lacks the skills. Could the protagonist to dialogue with himself and reason his way out of his despair? He could discover, no, he could not. This could comment on “self-help” movements, but I believe that Michael Keaton movie did that.

As it stands, I lack the imagination to deepen Cronenberg’s treatment of his premise. A mini-series might allow that, but then it may remind one of the Westworld series.

SKINAMARINK

Skinamarink is bleak, too. Two children awake in the middle of the night to find their parents missing and the doors, windows, and toilet gone. It takes its premise from nightmares and should be viewed not as a movie with a plot arc, but a rendering of a child’s subconscious. When you were a toddler, remember how weird your house was in the middle of the night? How little control you had over anything? How you could just experience the moment, no matter how bewildering the moment?

So an hour and a half of that. The space of the ranch home is almost liminal and the very grain of the darkness is its own character, changing shape and pattern.

In its own way, Skinamarink makes its own statement of love versus existence. The sister’s mutilation is a jump scare. The mom vanishing before our eyes is a slow, gut-dropping shock. But when asked to join them, the boy says “no”. Because leaving known existence will probably be worse.

Knock On The Cabin

This movie examines love versus existence directly. A family must murder one of its members or the world ends. Shaymalan sets his intrinsic Speilberginess to fight his intrinsic Hitchcockiness. If you’ve watched his movies, you already know which wins.

The directing starts out labored (the extreme close ups scream “Look at the tension I’ma buildin'”), but recedes well enough.

Does anyone ask “Hey visionaries? After I’m dead, what happens next?” No, no one does.

What we have here is a dearth of style. The Hollywood releases are elevator pitches, not just plot driven but plot-exclusive. They have no space for mood. I would like to see Skinamarink handle disparity or identity, or more deeply, the value of love over existence.