“I don’t think you’re a spider, you’re a moth. Quiet, harmless, drawn to shiny things, banging up against a window, and begging to get in.” – Venetia, Saltburn
It’s safe to say that based on their existing films, Promising Young Woman and Possessor respectively, that neither Emerald Fennell nor Brandon Cronenberg are exactly unfamiliar with characters operating well outside the bounds of the law and indeed basic human decency. In both cases, their latest films continue digging into fertile ground.
Fennell’s new film, Saltburn, has already captured the public imagination, to the point that posh if clueless kids who live in very large houses have taken to re-enacting the infamous final scene (as opposed to the infamous earlier scenes) on TikTok, somehow failing to grasp the implications of why it came to pass.
Growing up in a prestigious university town, you quickly realise that not all Oxbridge students are created equal. There are those from regular backgrounds who got there just by being really bloody clever, but there’s also a confidently self-styled elite who got there because daddy bought a posh school a library once, so their entire childhood has been carefully tailored to funnel them into a top university.
This is where Barry Keoghan’s Oliver finds himself at the start of the film, a poor but smart kid wearing the anachronistically smart outfit whose entire concept of Oxford students has been filtered through Hollywood recreations of the place, filtered through a childhood of Harry Potter watched obsessively over and over again on the glowing screen of a tiny bedroom telly.
See, Olly is a little what you might call ‘focused’, and in particular focused on getting in with tall, rich, charming and beautiful fellow student Felix, who fits into that category of “posh but less of a bastard than his chums” that pops up in this sort of film quite often. Olly’s wiles lead to him being invited home for the summer to Felix’s family pile, a vast stately home with an even larger garden (with a maze, of course) to meet the fam, including a gloriously vile and self-serving mum played with some glee by Rosamund Pike.
What starts off seeming like just a crush, if a creepy one, quickly escalates into something far more sinister, as Olly burrows like a weevil into the daily lives of each family member, rather evoking Pasolini’s Teorema. This leads to disaster, or rather a whole series of them, and possibly the most disturbing bathtime scene since A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The cast is excellent, but it’s very much Barry Keoghan’s film. It’s hardly like he’s been a slouch in previous roles, but in Saltburn he finds a fresh intensity, and seems to have spent valuable time with Fennell developing the main character to the most lurid believable extreme.
Emerald Fennell is from a privileged background herself, and has now made two compelling films in which those with privilege, whether through gender or wealth, are reminded that what was unearned can still be taken away in the blink of an eye.
Meanwhile Infinity Pool, Cronenberg’s latest, drops its protagonist, played by moody man mountain Alexander Skarsgård, into a very similar situation. A flashy and hyper-exclusive if barbed wire-fenced tourist resort in a made-up authoritarian country, containing a group of decadent, partying ex-pats who Skarsgård’s character would dearly love to be part of, led by appropriately named latterday body horror queen, Mia Goth.
Did I mention the body horror? Cronenberg, duh. Of course there’s body horror.
Skarsgård’s monosyllabic novelist James Foster and his long-suffering wife are taken out on an illegal excursion to a beach by Goth and her husband. After an illicit hand shandy from Goth’s self-proclaimed fan of his books, Foster manages to squish a local with a car and get in a great deal of trouble with the authorities. It then turns out that rather than actually face the music, you can (if you’re a rich ex-pat at least), pay to have a clone executed for your crimes, though you do have to watch.
This high concept established, Infinity Pool follows Foster as he willingly falls down the rabbit hole after the increasingly screechy and bullying Goth and her jaded cohorts, as they break the law (not hard in a country where most things are illegal) in increasingly extreme fashion, and witness the consequences.
With a cast of wealthy people up to no good locked away in private apartment complexes, it’s not hard to draw comparisons with daddy Cronenberg’s Shivers, especially during a drug-fuelled orgy sequence where reality and fantasy become a jump cut blur of mutant organs and strange couplings. However the sunny, idyllic and breezy surroundings full of bored mavens prepared to do anything to feel something evoke Ballard more than anything, with sprinkling of Yuzna’s Society.
Infinity Pool clips along briskly, with some beautiful cinematography and editing, and Croneberg does a good job of creating a former Yugoslavia-esque setting, right down to terrifying secret police, and even an entirely made up language. However it suffers from the fact that everyone, except Foster’s long-suffering wife, who is sidelined very early on, is utterly, irredeemably horrible. Even the victims of the crimes. It makes it hard to relate to anyone, and is a dramatic contrast to Saltburn, where everyone is also horrible, but in many ways relatable and even a bit sad.
Also, and this may just be a personal thing, I really struggle with Alexander Skarsgård as a central protagonist. His moody, taciturn walking wardrobe with the propensity for sudden violence schtick worked powerfully for him in ensemble shows such as Big Little Lies, but was oddly unengaging in Mute and The Northman. He’s oddly inert in Infinity Pool, especially in comparison to the unhinged Goth, who is impressively committed to batshittery. Though with Cronenberg’s camera lingering on her, increasingly crosses over into just plain annoying.
Both Saltburn and Infinity Pool delve deeply into the extremes of how wealth and complacency can corrupt. However the former brings a freshness to the trope while Infinity Pool just rearranges existing components in a stylish but ultimately empty way. Though maybe that’s precisely the point.
