Review: Infinity Pool is an impressive R-rated sci-fi horror movie

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree when it comes to filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg, the director who had us riveted as people got their jollies from car crash injuries in Crash.

Brandon Cronenberg has continued in the family business, but also shares his father's interest in celebrity, in body augmentation and bio-technology - concepts dad explored in films like Maps to the Stars and The Fly.

With Infinity Pool, the younger Cronenberg takes a vacation in one of the European countries on the travel advisory list.

Married couple James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) and wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are holidaying at a resort in the fictional European country of Li Tolqa, and it is interesting signposting that Cronenberg names Cleopatra Coleman's character Em Foster.

E.M. Forster was, of course, the novelist of Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room With A View, where repressed English tourists were come undone by their own lust in the sultry heat of foreign climes.

James has caught the eye of another couple staying at the resort, Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert).

Gabi recognises the author, gushes about his first novel and politely changes the subject when James seems uncomfortable about his six-year wait for a possible follow-up novel.

James puts his writer's block to one side for an afternoon of drinking in the sun on a picnic with this new couple. On the drive home James hits a local farmer and kills him, and before you can say David Cronenberg meets I Know What You Did Last Summer, the local police are knocking on the door and dragging James and Em into separate interrogation rooms.

Gabi might have warned James that the police in Li Tolqa can be dangerous, but local detective Thresh (Thomas Kretschman) makes an offer.

For a fee he will make a clone of James for the family of the slain farmer to kill in retaliation for the hit and run accident.

Suddenly it is like a curtain has been drawn back and James sees the world in a dark new way.

From its opening credits, with ominous drums and spiralling camerawork, we know this film is going to give us a nightmare of new pop-culture reference points.

My partner and I are about to leave for the planned overseas holiday COVID ruined for us three years ago, and already I can see us saying "Infinity Pool" to each other when we meet a creepily interesting couple or find ourselves in a scarily run-down part of town.

Young Cronenberg is certainly a talent.

He holds your attention from the opening scene and you cannot turn away, regardless of how intense the performances are, how luridly psychedelic is the lighting, how much of an acid trip is the editing, how mordant is cinematographer Karim Hussain's eye for the macabre and banal.

Did I say the performances are intense? Goth is already a meme for a scene in this film, screaming and holding a gun.

She is a brilliant young talent and her performance here manifests a barely contained menace, the awkwardly intense new social acquaintance that jump-cuts from social satire to Jason Voorhees.

While it might open as a bleaker White Lotus, it is in fact a sci-fi horror film with an R rating.

Cronenberg earns that rating in glorious artfulness with genitalia morphing into possibly insects and with drug-fuelled sex and a naked Skarsgard barking and wrestling himself.