For this writer, one of my favorite filmmakers working today is Brandon Cronenberg. Sure, comparisons to his father’s creative output are always going to happen (and their emboldened nature as storytellers is certainly a connective tissue between the two), but with just three features under his proverbial belt, Brandon has demonstrated time and time again that he’s blazing a path unlike anyone else—past or present—including his own dad. And with Infinity Pool, Cronenberg has crafted one of the most intoxicatingly perverse films of the last decade, a cinematic achievement that is shockingly audacious, completely unhinged, and excessively violent, and I could not have loved it more.

At the start of Infinity Pool, we are introduced to James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), while they are on vacation at a hoity-toity private resort on the fictional island of Li Tolqa. Something of a failed writer,...