“The line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This movie is going to get completely spoiled. 

Infinity Pool tells the story of James and Em Foster, a couple of young socialites, who are thrust into a nightmare of depravity when they discover that the small, impoverished country which they are visiting has cracked the code to human cloning, and uses it in some very interesting ways. What follows is an exploration of unhinged libertinism and moral nihilism which pushes James to the limit of his sanity, and then beyond it. 

Infinity Pool is a 2023 film directed by Brandon Cronenburg and starring Alexander–does anybody actually care about this? Feels like this obligatory shop talk just slows everything down. I’m just going to get on with it. 

Like I said, James and Em are a well-to-do couple vacationing at a luxurious resort in the fictional country Li Tolqa. Their marriage is a lackluster one. James is a struggling writer who hasn’t published anything in years. He’s bored, cynical, and is supported by his wife, the extremely wealthy daughter to a publishing mogul. And this is a fact for which he harbors a deep resentment. Neither of them appear very happy with their arrangement, despite having been together for a decade. They seem dissatisfied, with their lives and with each other. 

But their vacation is suddenly enlivened when James meets Gabi Baur, who claims to be a huge fan of James’s book and invites him and Em to have dinner with her and her husband, Alban. There they discuss their work and relationships, and Gabi and James share a dance. The following day, the couple invite James and Em out for a day trip into the countryside. Gabi’s husband questions Em about why she is with James right in front of him, pointing out what a loser James is, and Em blames it on “daddy issues.” They get very drunk, and Gabi gets a little hand-job-sy with James while the two are alone. 

On the way back, James offers to drive, even though he is in no state to do so and ends up hitting a man on the road. Gabi insists that they should return to the resort and never speak of it, and they follow her advice. But the next morning, James and his wife wake up to police at their front door. They are arrested and a detective tells James that in Li Tolqa, the penalty for his crime is death at the hands of the dead man’s eldest son. But, James has a way out. Li Tolqa offers a very unique option in which, for a substantial fee, a guilty party can have a clone made of themselves, and this clone will absorb the punishment. Despite being extremely confused, James chooses this option. He is taken through a bizarre cloning process, and afterwards, he and Em are forced to observe a grizzly spectacle in which James’s clone is stabbed to death by a young boy, the son of the man he killed. In the moments just before his death, he cries out, “Help me, Em!” 

Em watches in terror, but on James’s face we see something else: fascination. He’s witnessed his own death and lived to tell the tale. And in this brutality, he glimpses some new realm of possibility, a world of freedom that he’s never known. 

After the execution, Em wants to get away as quickly as possible, but James can’t find his passport. Without any way of leaving the country, he extends their stay at the hotel for another week. As he’s making the arrangements, he crosses paths with Gabi again, who tells him that she hasn’t been completely honest with him and asks him to come with her. She introduces him to a group of other foreigners, all of whom have also been cloned and are now “zombies” as they put it. Already inclined towards libertinism, this group has found that the customs of Li Tolqa allow a level of freedom that can’t be found anywhere else. Though they say that the country itself is highly religious and deeply conservative, the resort has been constructed as a kind of playpen where, as long as you have the funds to pay for a double, there are essentially no restrictions. 

Eventually, the other zombies explain to James that they want him to join them for a little game. The owner of the resort has received an award for his contribution to Li Tolqa’s prosperity. It’s implied that this has a lot to do with the executions of Gabi’s friends (or rather their doubles) and that the group thinks that they need to bring the resort owner down a peg. They have decided to break into his home and steal the award, as recompense for his insult of having them put to death. 

The group put on ritualistic masks that appropriately give each of them a demonic appearance before breaking into the resort owner’s home. After subduing him and these…random prostitutes? Not entirely sure…Gabi attempts to convince James to murder him. [Show me how strong you are.] but James says “na.” A security guard comes in shooting and Alban is hit in the leg. The group shoots their way out and heads back to the resort. 

The next morning we find the lot of them waiting in the holding cell. The detective comes in and says he’s going to make an example of all of them, and for a moment, it seems like he might not let them use a double, but it’s quickly discovered that this has already happened. The imprisoned group were the doubles, and the originals watch again as they are brutally killed, this time laughing and clapping. 

After the execution, Em says she’s leaving and James tells her to “run back to daddy.” Later, Gabi tells James that it’s for the best, that his wife was a bad match for him. She tells him that women like Em train men to believe that they are weak, and that now that training has to be undone for James. 

They go to Gabi’s room where they smoke a powerful hallucinogenic drug, which Gabi explains is used for religious purposes in Li Tolqa so you know that this is about to get wild, and then they have…man just the longest and most uncomfortable sex scene you’ve ever seen. 

You know when you get to the end of 2001 Space Odyssey, and there’s that psychedelic sequence that you always forget about? and it goes on for like forty minutes, and at a certain point, you just kind look over at the person that you talked into watching this, someone who believed in you, who put their evening into your hands, and you just have look them right in the eyes and say “This is your fault for trusting me.” 

It’s not quite as long as that, but man it’s close. It starts off pretty normal, but eventually, James looks up and realizes that the whole club has gotten involved, and–oh look–they’re wearing the creepy masks, and–oh look–there’s Alban’s beside the bed jerking himself off as he watches James have sex with his wife. I mean this thing goes on literally forever; you have to wonder if there was nobody tell Cronenburg “Hey man, two minutes is probably enough of this weird-ass shit” or if somebody tried and he just turned to them and was like “I’ll tell you when it’s enough.” 

After this, we see James and the gang back in the dining area of the resort, and he has gone full ubermensch alpha-male. He’s got his shirt off and he’s spitting cherries at the other guests and just generally looking pretty insane. One of the group tells him that they’ve figured out that the detective is the one preventing him from being able to replace his passport, but they’ve got a plan to let James get revenge. They’re going to go to a clinic where he is having an operation done that night (yeah, this is very bizarre), but whatever, James buys it and they go to abduct the detective, who they bring out with a sack over his head, and like…of course this is another clone. I know it; you know it. But James somehow doesn’t know it; so he beats the hell out of the guy, and then whips out his dick and pees on him, and Alban even joins in on this part, and it’s at this point that Gabi steps in and pulls off the sack and “oh gee, surprise!” Who could have possibly seen this coming? 

And even though James has seen himself get straight up butchered TWICE now, he gets super upset. He takes off and runs back to his hotel room, and we see that HE had hidden his own passport, which he now retrieves so he can leave. But when he tries to get to the airport on the shuttle, Gabi and the gang show up and kidnap him. And as they’re marching him back, Gabi reveals that they’ve been playing James this entire time. 

She’s not a fan of his book. She hadn’t even read it. But she’s a great judge of character, and she’d seen in just a couple of days of observing him at the resort that James was exactly the kind of man that she could manipulate, a man with secret misgivings about his wife, about his status, about his place in life, a man who longed to be more than he is. After psychologically profiling him, she’d researched him finding that nobody had read his book and that it had received bad reviews, and she (kind of inexplicably) still has one of the reviews and begins reading it. It’s vicious, but the most interesting revelation is that James’ book probably would not have been published at all without the assistance of Em’s father. 

All this time, Gabi has been encouraging James to believe that he is a great man held back by the petty conventions of petty people around him, a belief that James is all too ready to accept about himself, but here we see that James isn’t some thwarted superman. 

James manages to escape the group, but he takes a bullet in the leg. He crawls to a nearby farmhouse where he’s taken in, and while there he has fever dream where the son of the man he killed comes in and strangles him –and I really can’t get over how much this kid looks like the kid from What About Bob, it is truly uncanny– and then he pulls the kid’s face apart and inside is his wife’s face, who is laughing at him and mockingly crying out “Please help me, Em!” the lines his double shouted before he died, indicating that James has realized that he is not the man who gets away, he is the victim, and that, as humiliating as it is, he needs help. 

He wakes from his fever dream and leaves the house, where he’s confronted once again by Gabi and the gang, and they present him with his double, who they have so psychologically broken that he now is more animal than man. This, they explain, is James’s final test: what began as an effort to save himself, must now end with James facing his own total degradation, seeing himself as nothing more than a beast to be slaughtered. To be truly amoral is to hold nothing as sacred, not even yourself. James at first refuses, but when he is attacked by the double, he fights back and brutally kills it. 

Afterwards, Gabi cradles a mentally crushed James and offers him her nipple (not before smearing it with the blood from James’s double) like a suckling baby. Just like Gabi wanted, he has been reborn. God is this blurred enough? [blur more]. There we go. That’s better. 

The next day, James makes a call to Em. He tells her that he’s sorry and that he’s on his way home before boarding the shuttle with Gabi and the rest of the foreigners who now look extremely average. On their way, they talk about work and housekeeping, creating a jarring juxtaposition between the grotesqueness of the week’s events and the mundanity of the current topics of discussion. You would never imagine that these people had spent the last several days on a drug-fueled sex-murder rampage. When they arrive at the airport, Gabi and Alban wish James well, telling him that they hope to see him again next year, and then they depart, like nothing ever happened. 

James stands watching as they leave, and then he turns to see all of the other people in the airport: normal people, smiling and laughing. And something inside of him prevents him from getting on the plane. Instead, he returns to the resort, which has now been shut down due to the monsoons, and in the final shot, we see James sitting on the beach, being drenched in the rains. 

Morality

Morality is a slippery subject. Is there such a thing as absolute morality? Does the world contain moral facts the same way that it contains physical facts? Or is it merely a system of prejudices that changes over time as society develops different needs and priorities? Many (I would say most) people like to play both sides of this coin. They want to say morality is socially constructed and available to change as society changes—particularly when the moral principle at hand is one that they wish to abolish or abrogate—but they also act as if it still carries the force of the absolute at any given time. Needless to say, when explicitly stated, the absurdity of this position is obvious. 

In the absence of any kind of transcendental warrant, what we call “morality” has no more justification than the simple dictum that “might makes right.” What makes this thing good and that thing evil? Simply the prejudices of those who wield dominant power. In this state, all statements criticizing the past for its moral faults are simply bad faith. Moral relativism does not extend only to other geographical or cultural regions but through time as well. And who knows what moral law that exists today may be turned on its head tomorrow? 

But this invites the question, is all morality equally arbitrary, contingent, and illegitimate? 

When James initially faces the prospect of death for having accidentally killed the man on the road, he sees it as ridiculous, maybe even barbaric. Most people would. The eldest son gets to kill you personally in order to maintain the family’s honor? What kind of world is this? James, coming from a radically different culture, sees this moral standard as totally absurd and from his moral frame, it is; and when he’s given a chance to side-step it, he gladly takes it. 

But when you start dismissing some moral standards, it can be difficult to determine where you should stop, or why? The title Infinity Pool refers to a certain pool design made to give the effect that there is no wall to the pool, that it has no boundary, and obviously, this image is employed symbolically to represent a world of possibility in which the boundaries of morality have been erased.

In this context, it may even be tempting to believe that morality itself is nothing more than a convention meant to protect the weak by placing restraints on the strong, obstructing their pursuit of whatever gives them pleasure. This position finds its historical precedent in the Marquis de Sade, the man from whom we get the word “sadism.”  

And it is this position that is represented by Gabi and her crew. It is the reason that she repeatedly entices him to show her “how strong” he is. She wants to persuade him that morality is just a handicap that’s been placed on him, training that made him believe that he was weak. This incidentally, was also how Nietzsche saw the situation, and his “ubermensch” was the person who was able to break the bonds that morality tried to put on him. James, in his imagination, sees himself as one of those Nietzschean supermen. He thinks that he’s a lion. But lions, when you really think about it, are just big cats. 

During medieval times, map makers would label certain areas of the world that had not yet been explored with the phrase hic sunt dracones – “Here be dragons.” James’ arrogance, his belief that he is a lion in a world filled with sheep, is exactly what Gabi uses to pull him out into deep waters, and James realizes too late that in the infinite waters of moral nihilism, there be dragons. James, however “strong” he imagines himself to be, has lines that he can’t cross, things that even he can’t bring himself to do.  And, foolishly, he believed that those lines were absolute for everyone, but Gabi and the others prove him wrong.   

Infinity Pool is about what happens when you try to step out of the confines of morality only to realize that you needed it after all. James may be willing to break some rules; he may welcome the breach in morality that allows him to escape execution, or cheat on his wife, but ultimately, the horrors of total moral nihilism are too much for him. 

Some might interpret James returning to the resort at the end as him being unable to go back to normal boring life after having gotten a taste of libertinism, but I don’t think this is correct.   

Gabi and Alban are entirely demoralized, as in, they have eradicated all moral sense from themselves. They are able to bathe in blood in one moment and talk about rearranging their furniture in the next without any friction. True monsters do not even recognize their monstrousness, after all, to do so would be to acknowledge the moral standard by which they have been judged monstrous. To the true monster, even their crimes are trivial. 

James’s refusal to return to normal society is his last moral act. It shows that for all the damage that has been done to him, some small shred of his morality remains, and this last shred knows that he has become a monster. As he sits alone in the empty airport, he’s faced with the choice of acknowledging the horror that he has been through, or simply moving on. If he returns, if he learns to live with himself after all that he’s done, then he would be no different than Gabi, and that after all has been her mission this entire time: to produce another vampire. But James ultimately resists and makes the last moral choice he can: he chooses to stay, to remain in the hell that he has found.

In the introduction to this essay, I part of quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but left out its ending: “The line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…And even within heart overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.” 

I’ve never been one of those who constantly pine for sequels or obsess of “spending more time” in some world because they like it or find it interesting. The merits of escapism are substantial, but they have their limits. And I am NOT suggesting that there should ever be a sequel to Infinity Pool, but I do find it interesting to think about what might happen to James after this point, what his redemption might look like. Twenty-odd years into the 21st century, even nihilism is played out, at least for some of us. And I can’t help wondering what comes next, after the nihilism, after despair, after the long rains.