Halloween may be over, but that isn’t going to stop Film4 airing some science fiction body horror on a Saturday night. Case in point, the channel is showing 2023’s Infinity Pool at 11.35pm tonight.
Directed by David Cronenberg’s son Brandon, the film stars MaXXXine’s Mia Goth, Succession’s Alexander Skarsgard and Black Rabbit’s Cleopatra Coleman.
It follows a couple who travel to an isolated island resort in a fictional country for a holiday, where they strike up a friendship with another couple.
They ignore the warnings to remain inside the resort and instead go off exploring the wilderness, where tragedy strikes, and they discover that the country has a very strange punishment system for tourists.
We won’t give anything away, but that’s where the science fiction element comes in.
Elevation Pictures
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The film has a very strong 87% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 237 critic reviews, with Empire calling it “a slick, satirical, insane thrill-ride”.
“Combining sly social commentary, mind-bending hallucinogenic orgy sequences, and a tinge of sci-fi body horror, Infinity Pool aims squarely at wealth and the desiccated morals that come with the power of money,” wrote iNews, which also called the film “Hitchock on acid”.
“As sophisticated, morally murky sci-fi, this is as good as Cronenberg’s father David Cronenberg at his best,” the Financial Times said. “But Cronenberg fils has his own particular aesthetic sensibility, palpable in the macro and ultra-wide angle lenses used by his cinematographer Karim Hussain. It’s bracingly nihilistic stuff.”
Universal
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The Guardian stated that Mia Goth gave “a tremendous turn” in her performance, while the film itself contains “some intriguingly nasty ideas”, although the publication felt like there were too many “shark-jumping moments in the second and third acts”.
Looking ahead, Cronenberg is working on a science fiction epic called Dragon, which recently resumed development after being put on pause for years.
Plot wise, it’s said to be about humans who poach intergalactic creatures in deep space in order to produce hallucinogenic drugs.
Infinity Pool airs on Film4 at 11.35pm tonight, and should be available on Channel 4 streaming afterwards.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he’s covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I’m a Fish.