Brandon Cronenberg's Infinity Pool has all the hallmarks and tropes of body horror within its clone story, but fortunately, the focus of its surreal plot avoids a serious sci-fi mistake. When James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) travel to a beautiful island resort, they have no idea the unspeakable terrors that they're going to witness and become a part of. All around them, the wealthy elite partake in the most lurid crimes imaginable, but rather than get executed themselves, they have clones made to accept the repercussions of their hedonism.
Unable to be a party to what she sees, Em returns home, leaving James, a novelist, in the hands of Gabi (Mia Goth), one of his biggest fans and an alluring enabler to his debauchery. As James plunges further into the depths of a sordid fever dream filled with sex and violence throughout the sci-fi movie, he has more clones made to satisfy his morbid curiosity about what it feels like to be bound by nothing. Fortunately, the message behind Infinity Pool is more important than the typical sci-fi trope that another movie would choose to focus on.
Infinity Pool's Story Isn't About The Ramifications Of Cloning
While Infinity Pool features cloning as a key aspect of its plot, it doesn't focus on its ramifications. Whether cloning in and of itself is morally permissible doesn't concern Cronenberg, and it doesn't really concern the characters, making it a narrative device and a means to explore issues of ego and entitlement. Once James gets over the initial shock that he can be cloned, he's quickly immersed in the clones' purpose of liberation, and the plot moves on to highlight the ways in which the clones allow the wealthiest guests to avoid punishment for their actions.
The clones are therefore a vehicle in the sci-fi movie to showcase the various points that Cronenberg makes about the lawless elite and the idea that the only thing holding anyone back from succumbing to utter depravity is a fear of atonement. Much like in his father David Cronenberg's movies, the method isn't as important as the motive, therefore it's not important how the clones are made, or whether it's ethical to make them, but how they are used as part of a classist system. As long as James can keep affording the clones, he can keep having them killed, until only killing a clone with his bare hands holds up a mirror to his callous savagery.
Infinity Pool Keeps Sci-Fi Tropes To A Minimum
Fortunately, Infinity Pool keeps the sci-fi movie tropes to a minimum, and Cronenberg only uses cloning and an altered sense of reality in service to the psychological horror of the plot. Science fiction, like all genre fiction, uses (and reuses) certain tropes to tell an important story and communicate thought-provoking messages, and Cronenberg wisely avoids anything to do with alternate universes, time travel, or simulations to do so.
The ending of Infinity Pool is open to interpretation, but also doesn't hinge on some huge clone twist, either. Introducing clones early on in the story doesn't make it all about them; they are simply useful plot devices, means to interesting scenarios, and sometimes useful for comic relief. If the Infinity Pool movie plot was really all about the clones, it would be like dozens of other, less original horror movies in circulation, but instead, it takes what could have been the premise and turns it into the purveyor.
