Cronenbergs

Brandon Cronenberg’s new film serves up another slice of that luxury fear-porn that we’ve had on TV’s The White Lotus and Succession, or Triangle of Sadness in the movies. Here, the trappings and appurtenances of the leisured super-rich might turn out to be just the design features of a prison. Infinity Pool is set in a super-exclusive vacation resort, a razor-wired compound of pampering on an otherwise poverty-stricken fictional island – but the place turns out to have Hotel California-style rules about the respective…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeLuxury holidays don’t come any grislier than the one endured by James (Alexander Skarsgärd), and his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) in Brandon Cronenberg’s luridly enjoyable new horror picture, Infinity Pool.James and Em are vacationing in a hotel compound in Li Tolqa, a corrupt and violent tropical state. James is a struggling author with one book to his name. He is hoping the holiday…

Early on in David Cronenberg’s masterpiece Videodrome, TV station programmer Max Renn (James Woods) brings radio host Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry) back to his bachelor pad for the seduction that’s been coming since they exchanged some heated words about the decline of western culture on a roundtable talkshow. She declared the “gorging on ” promoted by his channel Civic-TV to be a bad thing, only to concede a few seconds later that she can’t help living “in a highly excited state”. So as they enter his cluttered apartment,…

Image: Courtesy of Sundance InsituteOf course io9 wants you to read this review, but Infinity Pool—the latest from Brandon Cronenberg (Antiviral, Possessor)—is one of those movies you shouldn’t know too much about before you watch it. No spoilers here, but if you want to go in totally blind, you’ve been warned.Set on a fictional island (Croatia provides the gorgeously scenic backdrops) at an exclusive resort, Infinity Pool introduces us to James (The Northman’s Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (In the Shadow of the Moon’s…

David Cronenberg’s latest feature shares a title with an experimental film he made in 1970. In the wake of the original Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg would effectively invent, refine and then move on from “‘body horror” cinema, leaving a genre-defining canon of fantasy films (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly) that used the mutations of the flesh to discuss matters of life and death. Since 1988’s Dead Ringers, the Canadian auteur’s preoccupations have been more psychological (notwithstanding the…

“Let nothing be called natural in an age of bloody confusion,” said Brecht; after this film, things look bloodier and more confused than ever. David Cronenberg’s new movie in the Cannes competition, Crimes of the Future, is a body-horror atrocity exhibition in the Ballardian style that he gave us in Crash (1996), which was about the secret cult of connoisseurs devoted to the erotic dimension of car crashes. As for this film, one of the macabre things to be witnessed here has one character purring passionately: “It’s juicy…

Image via Cannes Film Festival. A trio of clips from David Cronenberg’s upcoming Crimes of the Future has surfaced online, giving us our first look at the director’s return to the body horror genre out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film stars Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Steward, and Léa Seydoux, and takes the director back into the world of sci-fi after making a number of films in recent years that can more firmly be placed in the realm of grounded thrillers, such as A History of Violence and Cosmopolis.…