Infinity Pool Reviews Roundup – What’s The Hype About?

Infinity Pool is a new horror film and might I say the first horror film of the year, barring M3GAN as that more of a horror-comedy. The film stars Alexandar Skarsgard, Cleopatra Coleman, Amanda Brugel and what I genuinely think horror genre veteran Mia Goth. The film is written and directed by Brandon Croneberg, who is the son of David Croneberg, one of the many pioneers of the body horror genre. The premise of the film revolves around, “Guided by a seductive and mysterious woman, a couple on vacation venture outside the resort grounds and find themselves in a culture filled with violence, hedonism and untold horror. A tragic accident soon leaves them facing a zero tolerance policy for crime: either you’ll be executed, or, if you’re rich enough to afford it, you can watch yourself die instead.”

The film has had mixed response with some critics understanding what Croneberg is trying to achieve while others have found the movie vague and unsatisfactory. I would still say the film has had good critical reception as it has 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.9/10 on IMDb. Let’s look at what exactly works in the film and what doesn’t according to the critics.

Infinity Pool Reviews Roundup – Brandon Croneberg Delivers an Impactful Film?

Jordan Hoffman
AV Club
“Everyone, even the most well-adjusted person, dances with self-destructive behavior. How else can we explain Wendy’s Baconator?”

A.A. Dowd
Chron
“It’s the Grand Guignol fever dream of a bored Roman emperor.”

Peter Howell
Toronto Star
“Brandon Cronenberg delivers the shivers, and more than a few WTF moments, with a vacation inferno creeper that gnaws at the mind.”
Original Score: 3/4

James Berardinelli
ReelViews
“The film piques the intellect and feeds the bloodlust while offering an experience that only a Cronenberg can deliver.”
Original Score: 3/4

Nicolas Rapold
Financial Times
“It is a self-conscious but effective midnight movie, with strobe and bad-trip sequences that make you want to stay at home for spring break.”

David Sims
The Atlantic
“The premise of Infinity Pool was deliciously nasty enough to keep me invested for most of its nearly two-hour running time… [But] at a certain point, every last bit of allegory has been killed as well.”

Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune
“Cronenberg knows what he’s doing, and this is his most assured act of science-fiction effrontery to date.”
Original Score: 3.5/4

Alison Willmore
New York Magazine/Vulture
“The film’s woozy spectacles do eventually become numbing, as does Goth’s turn as the yowling ringleader, but that’s all in line with the experience.”

William Bibbiani
TheWrap
“A Souplantation salad bar of half-developed plot points and superficial graphic imagery, in service of a theme that’s about as generic as anything you’d find in a mainstream studio film.”

Richard Roeper
Chicago Sun-Times
“Goth goes all-out as the manipulative and psychotic Gabi; at times it’s as if she’s channeling Robert De Niro’s Max Cady…”
Original Score: 3.5/4

Keith Watson
Slant Magazine
“If David Cronenberg seems almost indifferent to his audience, Brendon Cronenberg is so fixated on freaking people out that he can sometimes neglect to do much else.”
Original Score: 2/4

Adam Graham
Detroit News
“The disturbing, funny, twisted, strange sci-fi nightmare is a dark plunge into the human condition or possibly just an exercise in extreme boundary pushing. Either way, it’s tough to take your eyes off of it…”
Original Score: B

David Rooney
Hollywood Reporter
“The go-for-broke extremity lacks the substance to make it more than an aggressive but shallow provocation.”

Barry Hertz
Globe and Mail
“The entire thing swallows you whole. There is no more delightful way to drown.”

Marjorie Baumgarten
Austin Chronicle
“Infinity Pool is a film that does not shrink from its transgressions.”
Original Score: 2.5/5

Jeannette Catsoulis
New York Times
“Soaked in an atmosphere of unrelenting dread, “Infinity Pool” works its canted camera angles and insistent, drumbeat-heavy score to transfixing effect.”

Keith Uhlich
(All (Parentheses))
“True to its title, Infinity Pool ebbs to a non-point”

Benjamin Lee
Guardian
“Attention-securing in the moment but oddly forgettable after, like waking up from a nightmare you can’t remember.”
Original Score: 3/5

Isaac Feldberg
Inverse
“Infinity Pool places its audience in a strange space, one that demands a certain degree of surrender to unrelenting psychotronic excess as well as the existential despair that yawns beneath it like an abyss.”

Michael O’Sullivan
Washington Post
“Brandon Cronenberg’s indie horror flick features battered brains, too much blood and an eye-roll-inducing plot.”
Original Score: 0.5/5

Katie Rife
Polygon
“Infinity Pool is the best horror satire about Americans abroad since Hostel.”

G. Allen Johnson
San Francisco Chronicle
“Cronenberg has made a movie about the quest to simply feel something.”
Original Score: 3/4

Katie Walsh
Tribune News Service
“If you’re willing to surf on the wonderfully weird and wild wavelength of “Infinity Pool” it is indeed a singular, and unforgettable, ride.”
Original Score: 4/4

Brian Tallerico
RogerEbert.com
“The increasingly impressive son of David Cronenberg has made a wildly surreal, unapologetic, violent, and pornographic movie about privilege, morality, and things I couldn’t possibly begin to explain in a review.”
Original Score: 3/4

Ed Gibbs
Time Out
“It’s one hell of a twisted ride with a troupe of truly awful characters as our guide. It’s damn-near unmissable and, from a safe distance, addictive as all hell.”
Original Score: 4/5

Nick Schager
The Daily Beast
“A film so extreme that the only reasonable response is often laughter.”

Hannah Strong
Little White Lies
“An atmospherical, grubby little downer of a holiday movie that takes on dark tourism and even darker desire with seductive, sickening style.”

David Fear
Rolling Stone
“It’s a movie that doubles (and triples, and quadruples) down on its ugliness. Yet it has picked its targets well.”

Esther Zuckerman
Vanity Fair
“The effect is certainly disconcerting — and it’s intended as such — but as the plot goes on you start to wonder if it isn’t just hollow artifice.”

Peter Debruge
Variety
“The cinematic equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing, which bends and breaks and folds back on itself in impossible ways. Brain-shattering as it all is, we can hardly tear our eyes away.”

Ryan Lattanzio
indieWire
“Cronenberg can’t match up to his own actors’ fearlessness, and it turns out all along he’s merely been navel-gazing into his own Narcissus pool, cloning his own previous visions and killing them before trying to make something new.”
Original Score: C

Meagan Navarro
Bloody Disgusting
“Cronenberg’s sense of style, paired with an unrelenting sense of dread and tension and two utterly captivating, depraved leads ensure these provocative waters are worth wading into.”
Original Score: 4/5

Infinity Pool is currently playing in theatres near you.

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