Nighy’s performance is tremendous, but he has superb raw material to work with in the situations Ishiguro creates for Williams: a getaway to a beachfront vacation town a growing friendship with one of his former employees (Aimee Lou Wood) the rituals of social deference that shape his existence. And he’s masterful at small touches, like a shot focused on Williams’ feet that shows him pushing off from his toes in a kind of leap into a new way of approaching his job. Right from the opening credits, director Oliver Hermanus crafts a lush production indebted to the cinema of the time in which its set, including Sandy Powell’s wonderful costumes and sweeping music by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch. This version is set in 1953 London, where long-widowed civil servant Rodney Williams (Bill Nighy) receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, and sets about trying to make sense of how to live his final months. Kazuo Ishiguro might have been the perfect choice to adapt Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Ikiru-not just because of his toehold in both Japanese and British cultures, but because this feels like a spiritual sibling to Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as a profile of the emotionally crippling consequences of following the path of least societal resistance. “Anti-colonial” feels almost too reductive for what Inifinity Pool is up to, as it goes gleefully berserk in exploring a particular kind of dehumanization, without ever once underlining what the title of the film suggests about people who feel that their playground is without limits. But it’s also true that tangled up in the viscera, body fluids and graphic orgies is a fairly ruthless satire of the extent to which people in the developed world see the rest of creation as a place to fulfill all of their desires, and where money can always grease the wheels of avoiding consequences. To say much more would be cheating, except that you should expect the same brand of graphic body horror Cronenberg fils has made his own in previous efforts like Possessor, and that Mia Goth is turning into one of the most fearless actors in cinema. There they meet and befriend another couple, Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert), but a day trip outside their resort compound turns into a fatal accident that embroils them all in Li Tolqa’s … unique legal system. It opens on a fictional resort island called Li Tolqa, where never-was novelist James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wealthy wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing. And it seems even more of a disservice considering the extent to which his latest feature revolves around a self-loathing tied up with privilege. Brandon Cronenberg keeps leveling up as a filmmaker, to the point where it feels ridiculous to keep identifying his parentage.
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