Review
DULCIE PEARCE
Infinity Pool review: Mia Goth steals the show again in a horror film that’s more gory than story
INFINITY POOL
(18) 118mins
★★★☆☆
HORROR films starring Mia Goth are like buses – you wait for one, then two come along at once.
Bouncing straight off last week’s excellent Pearl, Goth’s occasionally crazed eyes and twitchy smile are once again on the big screen to terrify us all.
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This time, she is on the holiday from hell in Brandon Cronenberg’s lurid thriller that is a cautionary tale to never leave the hotel resort complex.
One-time writer James (Alexander Skarsgard) and his wealthy wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are on a beach holiday that holds a lot of passive-aggressive conversation.
Wild depravity
James has written one book six years ago and not worked since, while Em bankrolls his endless writer’s block.
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Soon he meets flirtatious actress Gabi (Goth) and her French architect husband Alban (Jalil Lespert).
The pair are regular visitors to the fictional island and insist on taking the pair out for a boozy picnic on a deserted beach far away from the resort.
It’s a very uneasy occasion, which ends in a shocking drink-driving incident that gets James and Em arrested for murder.
According to the terrifying policeman, the punishment for this crime is execution.
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But if you have money, there’s an option to “double” yourself — meaning a clone of you can be created to then be killed.
A graphic and gory scene shows James watching his double being brutally stabbed to death.
And while Em is deeply traumatised to see her cloned husband being violently murdered, James feels nothing.
This sets him on a mission to meet more like-minded tourists who have also been on the receiving end of some cloning.
They take drug-taking to wild levels of depravity, some of which is stomach-churningly grotesque, including orgies and terrifying hallucinations.
Things all get a bit Clockwork Orange, with the drugged-up gang putting on terrifying masks and breaking into a house to cause horror and pain.
Goth, once again, is the show-stealer here, with a performance that makes you believe the unbelievable.
Skarsgard, too, is excellent and the first half of the film has you intrigued about how this idea of a cloning nightmare will play out.
Sadly, the movie loses direction, making it more gory than story.
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A GOOD PERSON
(15) 129mins
★★☆☆☆
I LIKE to imagine this is a film that started off as a very different idea.
My hope is director Zach Braff wanted it to be a hard-hitting drama about the horrors of the OxyContin painkiller epidemic that is infecting Middle America.
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But then, along the way, others got involved and suggested casting Morgan Freeman to do Shawshank-esque voiceovers, making this film a bizarre mix of gritty drama and slushy nonsense.
Allison (Florence Pugh) has a wonderful life – a handsome fiancé, great career and lovely friends.
But all this changes when she is involved in a car crash, killing her fiancé’s sister and her husband.
We see Allison a year later when she is living with her alcoholic mum (Molly Shannon) and dealing with an opiod addiction that started after she had surgery post-crash.
In a bid to get clean, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with her would-be father-in-law Daniel (Freeman) who tries to help guide her. But he comes undone himself.
Pugh makes this chaotic script bearable but the bad casting and unnecessary injection of schmaltz makes A Good Person, well, not very good.
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JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4
(15) 169mins
★★★☆☆
KEANU REEVES returns as the hitman trying to kill his way out of the criminal underworld.
John Wick has come a long way since that first film, where he sought vengeance against the criminals who killed his puppy.
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In this outing, he tries to bring down Bill Skarsgard’s Marquis Vincent de Gramont, the crime syndicate leader who keeps putting increasing bounties on his head.
The “John Wick versus the world” plot structure is essentially the same as the last two films, designed to give the fight sequences purpose beyond watching Reeves battle his way through henchmen and eccentric nemeses.
The addition of Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada as Wick’s old pals adds martial arts gravitas and flare but most new character introductions are superficial and leave loose ends.
Yet it is hard not to be sucked in and blown away by the formidable and highly stylised world director Chad Stahelski has created for the unrelenting but endearing Reeves to play in.
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It might be fighting for fighting’s sake, but they sure make it look majestic.
By Hanna Flint
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