The press tour for Infinity Pool kicked off with an edge that’s appropriate for the latest film by Brandon Cronenberg: moments after the red carpet for the film’s midnight premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, pictures flooded the internet of the film’s star, Alexander Skarsgård, talking to reporters with a dog collar around his neck. It was “a beautiful gift” from a “very generous” journalist, according to the actor.

“I’ve been to Sundance many times, but I’ve never done a midnight screening before,” Skarsgård tells me. “We went to some parties, and then when most people went home, we went to our premiere. The energy in the room was incredible.” Infinity Pool distributor, NEON, posted a picture on Twitter of Skarsgård next to his co-star: “Mia Goth and her dog” read the caption. And the image of Skarsgård leashed on all fours only gets stranger in context.

For Cronenberg, the screening bookended his experience of the Covid-19 pandemic. The writer-director's second film, Possessor, premiered at Sundance in January 2020, about two months before stay-at-home orders hit North America. His third, Infinity Pool, was part of the festival’s return to in-person programming in 2023. “I normally don't even like people. I’m a complete curmudgeonly hermit, but even I had to be moved by the experience of being around other human beings,” Cronenberg says. “It was wonderful, but very strange, to have the world end and then go to a film festival.”

Cronenberg knows all about strange things. Possessor shocked audiences with its pummeling violence and mind-bending sci-fi premise. (The word “gnarly” gets used a lot in the film’s Letterboxd reviews, as do “goopy”, “extreme” and “ultra-violent”.) Infinity Pool follows a similar formula, with different tweaks and combinations of elements: a little less blood, a little more sex and a fresh set of ideas for viewers to gnaw on. In this case, they’re devouring a savage Fererro Rocher of eat-the-rich satire, with an intriguing sci-fi hazelnut at its center.

Cronenberg says he finds “shock just for the sake of shock” boring, and that freaking out his audience isn’t his “primary intention” in making images of hallucinogenic orgies and sadistic home invasions. “You need to not just understand intellectually what the stuff is. You need to feel it.” He uses extreme sex and violence to make a point about human nature: “In this film, it’s very much about the contrast between these bland people in a bland context and then this animalistic violence and carnality. To me, presenting that stuff visually so that the audience has a visceral sense of it, and not just a theoretical one, is important.”

Technically, neither the audience nor the characters are supposed to be seeing Li Tolqa at all. Our protagonists—failed novelist James (Skarsgård) and his wife/meal ticket Em (Cleopatra Coleman)—are forbidden from leaving the razor wire-lined grounds of the Pa Qlqa Pearl Princess resort, where they’re staying for a couple of weeks so James can find “inspiration” for his new book. These rules are ignored at the urging of Gabi (Mia Goth), a hedonistic guest James meets on the beach, and her husband Alban (Jalil Lespert), a bored and wealthy architect who shares his wife’s appetite for transgression.

In the charmingly warped style typical of horror directors, Infinity Pool is partially inspired by Cronenberg’s own life. Although he emphasizes that he finds all-inclusive resorts “very sinister and horrible”, he did go on a trip to one about twenty years ago. “It too was a compound surrounded by, in that case, razor-wire fence that was loosely hidden by the palm leaves. You couldn’t leave the compound.” He adds that “the Chinese restaurant scene, dialogue aside, was taken directly from that resort. The horrible disco, the scene with the ATV rider being chased by guards—all of that actually happened.”

These resorts, real and imagined, are examples of what Cronenberg calls “a global tourist state that invades host states like acne or herpes—choose your preferred clustery bubble ailment”. He describes Pa Qlqa as a “tacky Disneyland mirror”, where “there is no real culture, there is no real history. It’s like an alternate dimension that intersects with our world at a strange angle.” If a depersonalized, delocalized simulacra of a place created solely for the pleasure of foreign tourists is the tinder, the entitlement of the guests is the match.

“This is not a playground for foreign children,” Detective Thresh (Thomas Kretschmann) tells James, Gabi and their smug friends at one point, but they treat it like one anyway. That leads directly to the rich, toasty hazelnut center of Infinity Pool: a cloning device the Li Tolqan government has made available to “international visitors” who end up (or deliberately put themselves) on the wrong side of the country’s Draconian legal system. Anything from blasphemy to murder is punishable by death in Li Tolqa—unless the accused has the resources to clone themselves, and have the clone executed in their stead.

Skarsgård says that it’s this element that drew him to the film. “I was intrigued by the cloning process and what happens to a character who is confronted with his own mortality and has to witness his own execution,” he says. “To me, the heart of the story is what happens to someone who has to witness his own death.” James goes through this process of “doubling” several times throughout Infinity Pool. As things become increasingly unmoored from reality, doubles of James start showing up that are poor imitations of the real thing—like the drooling, glassy-eyed “dog” crawling naked on all fours that inspired Skarsgård’s red-carpet look.

Skarsgård goes to some very vulnerable places as his character’s psyche is shredded for sport by Gabi and her snickering swinger buddies. “On a movie, sometimes you have to play a scene like that on day one, and there’s 200 people behind the camera. So it’s not like I trust each and every one of them; I don’t even know their names yet,” he says. “Hopefully you feel comfortable around the people you’re working with, so that being vulnerable or ugly or whatever’s demanded of the scene, that tap is open, and you can just let it flow.”

Skarsgård continues: “Vanity is very detrimental to the creative process. If you feel like you’re going in a specific direction, and then you start observing yourself from the outside … creatively, you just shrink. It’s very important to not do that, and to stay open.”

When Cronenberg talks about directing Skarsgård and his co-star Goth, he emphasizes this freedom to follow where the script leads you. “I really like it when actors surprise me,” the director says. “I like it when actors inhabit the character and make decisions and come up with interesting angles and edges to those characters. I like being caught off guard by that.”

He shares a story about Goth, the domme to Skarsgård’s slobbering sub, whose character in Infinity Pool is a volatile mix of flirtatious warmth and eroticized sadism. A memorable moment from the film comes when Goth catches Skarsgård trying to escape the resort; she is waving a gun and mocking him in a voice full of demented, throat-shredding vibrato. Before they started rolling on the scene, Cronenberg says that Goth asked him, “‘Brandon, could we load this gun and let me fire off a few shots to get myself pumped up?’ And I said, ‘No, we can’t do that,’” he laughs. “So what we did instead—and this was her idea—is that we started rolling early, and she was outside slapping the side of the bus and antagonizing [Skarsgård], getting herself worked up. Then she got into the car, and we started the shot.” He adds, “The best thing I could do in that moment was give her whatever she needed to get herself there.”

For Skarsgård, the engine of his performance is a question that’s only hinted at in the movie. “There is that chance that James is the clone and that the actual original James was executed. Maybe it happened the first time, maybe it happened the second time, or the third time,” he says. “When we first meet him in the movie, is there any chance that he’s already a clone? I thought it would be interesting to leave that to the audience to interpret.”

A wicked Grinch smile spreads across Skarsgård’s face as he asks these questions. It gets even bigger when he answers that, yes, he has decided for himself where the “real” James ends and the “doubled” James begins, and no, he will not share his opinion. It’s a question that recalls Blade Runner’s famous ‘Was Deckard a replicant?’ conundrum, which fans are still debating—and Harrison Ford is still talking about in interviews—40 years later. “I just find it more engaging and more interesting if you can leave that unanswered,” says Skarsgård.

As for what that metaphor is, the filmmaker describes “this sense of operating without consequence, but also the multiplicity of human beings and the way that we gaze at ourselves and obsess over ourselves,” before stopping himself. Just as he doesn’t want his interpretation of the script to get in the way of his actors’ performances, he doesn’t want his ideas of what the movie is abou” to “stamp out any possibility of exploration.” He says, “You inject art with so much of yourself, but that last piece of creation comes from the audience. There’s something wonderful about that. I especially think that if people disagree about the meaning of something, it’s great.”

Like the image conjured up by its title, Infinity Pool is a mirrored surface from which potential meanings stretch out into infinite horizons. “To me, watching a film is also a creative act,” Cronenberg concludes, encouraging the viewer to peer in and see what’s reflected back at them.