NC-17 Picture ‘Infinity Pool’ Featuring Alexander Skarsgard Naked and Breastfeeding
Skarsgard showed off the horror feature during the Midnight section of the 2023 Sundance Film Fest.

Neon is opening Pool in theaters January 27 with an R-rating but the cut that screened at Sundance was NC-17.
There were no notable walkouts, so that meant the crowd fully ingested the cocktail that not only featured skull-crushing violence and rich people behaving badly with clones, but also doses of blood, sperm and other bodily secretions — real or imagined — coming in and out of various body parts.

“There’s a lot of conformity and monotony when you read scripts,” said star Alexander Skarsgard at the post-Q&A with the cast and filmmaker.
“You’ve just seen the movie. It’s just crazy, crazy. Love it or hate it, but it’s rare to experience something like this as an actor.”

Written and directed by Cronenberg, the son of horror filmmaker David Cronenberg, Pool tells of an author (Skarsgard), who, after stalling out with his first book, visits a posh resort with his rich wife to find inspiration.
While there, he meets a fan, played by the Pearl breakout and horror queen Mia Goth, and her husband.
There’s a double date day trip outside the compound, which contains the first envelope-pushing scene: a close up of a penis getting masturbated and ejaculating.
The film’s fictional country, a vaguely Eastern European and Adriatic Sea locale, has a legal system for foreigners. For the right price, you can have a clone made to take your place in the execution line.
Which is what the author does, putting him down a perverse path with Goth’s character and her coterie of rich friends who abuse the cloning system for break-ins and kidnappings, all the while indulging in local hallucinatory drug as well as drug-fueled orgies.
The protagonist then descends into madness as he horrifyingly and gleefully watches himself get executed again and again.
The movie has a dream-like 1970s feel to it, manifest in its color palette and the editing choices, particularly in the hallucinatory sequences.
With the body horror on display, comparisons to the elder Cronenberg *whose late horror was Crimes of the Future) are inevitable.
“We had intimacy coordinator, because God knows there was a lot of intimacy that needed coordinating,” said actor John Ralston, also on stage with the cast and who plays one of Goth’s character’s rich friends.
“It was a wonderful world of prosthetics and seeing what was created. And what could come out of different orifices. So the artistic element was quite lovely.”
Cronenberg’s originality and creativity, which included pushing of boundaries, is what attracted the stars to the project.
Mia Goth was shooting Pearl in New Zealand and originally wasn’t going to read any scripts that were coming her way. But then she saw Cronenberg’s name pop up. And then she reflected on her films X, Pearl, and the new film she was being offered.
“All these characters were free and unhinged, and the fact that I was able to continue exploring these really wild characters felt like a real gift,” Goth said. “It was an immediate yes.”
Cronenberg said the movie had thematic connections to his previous films (Possessor and Antiviral) but that this one had different tricks and took thing further.
Skarsgard felt so strongly about the material that he became executive producer. “It’s an indie film and I wanted to do anything I could to help Brandon visualize it,” Skarsgard said.
“I get the script, it’s called Infinity Pool, it takes place at a resort, and I was like, ‘Mark, I got a fucking amazing job for us. It’s going to be warm and toasty and its going to be lovely.’
Cut to: Six months later, it’s snowing when I’m shooting that naked scene.”