Brandon Cronenberg: The Horror of Detachment
Any horror fan worth their salt will have heard of Brandon Cronenberg and the unmistakable marks he’s recently been making upon the horror landscape. His talent is unsurprising, given that he’s the son of eminent director, David Cronenberg, well-known for his explorations into technology, the body, and the often-horrific intersections of the two. His is certainly a notable legacy to uphold, but Brandon has easily proven himself worthy of his own acclaim.
While I’m no expert on David Cronenberg and won’t pretend to be, I quickly became an avid fan of Brandon’s work upon seeing his latest instalment, Infinity Pool (2023). Within less than two hours I’d gone from not even knowing who he was, to a complete certainty that he’s one of the most fascinating new voices in horror. It wasn’t long before I was consuming his earlier feature, Possessor (2020), and that conviction only grew in strength as the credits rolled.
Naturally, neither movie was a financial hit at the box office — given the great production value of both films Cronenberg likely wasn’t hurting for a decent budget, but it’s almost inevitable that horror movies outside of the mainstream won’t make even a fraction of that money back upon release. Despite the financial losses, however, both were well-received by audiences and critics with good ratings by Rotten Tomatoes and Empire. It’s clear that there are pockets of people, however small, who appreciate the younger Cronenberg’s brand of horror.
Both Possessor and Infinity Pool carry the same salient themes of humanity, specifically what it means to be human and how that definition can be pushed to its limits — or lost sight of completely. Certainly, this isn’t new territory within horror media. The question of what it means to be human is one of the oldest questions to be asked in the genre. It could even be said that every horror story has that issue at its core, from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818) and the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), to the more recent Us (2019). Even most horror villains, including zombies, werewolves and vampires, could be said to be like mirrors within which our own humanity, or lack thereof, is reflected.
And it makes sense that, both as a species and as individuals, we’d be so obsessed over the true nature of what we are and what that entails. After all, we have the innate ability to make good and bad decisions outside of our drives and impulses, as well as the ability to reflect on those decisions. That gives us a level of responsibility that other animals remain unburdened with. From the time of Socrates, this responsibility has raised all kinds of questions about what our obligations are, or what they should be; to ourselves, to our loved ones, and to society at large.
Tasya Vos and James, the respective protagonists of Possessor and Infinity Pool, both undergo their own metamorphoses from someone they recognise into almost alien entities. While Vos is already losing her grip on her identity at the start of the movie, by contrast, James is firmly secure in who he is. It isn’t until his double is created and brutally murdered in front of him that we see him begin his downward spiral. It could be said for both Vos and James that their grip on their sense of self is dwindled by the very literal removal of themselves,from themselves — where James’ is precipitated by seeing the death of his double, Vos’ is made worse each time her consciousness is transplanted into another body.
In both instances, the connections to those all-important things that help to make up who we are — memories, values, boundaries, our bodies themselves — begin to fray. At the end of Possessor, we begin to doubt whether Vos’ memories are genuine, or if she is simply reciting sentences she’s said many times before. James completely betrays any values he might have once held after murdering another of his own doppelgangers. We may be tempted to say that the doppelgangers in Infinity Pool are less than human themselves, or at least with dulled emotions, if any at all. There’s even the very plausible theory that the original James is the one killed at the beginning, only to be replaced by a double.
The fact that this is a theory and not a certainty goes to show that, on many levels, the doppelgangers are indistinguishable from us. If we accept that the James we follow throughout the movie is the original, then the murder of his double is made even more disquieting. It’s one thing to think that a synthetic doppelganger is capable of such savagery — perhaps even believable given that we think of them as less than human — and quite another to think that a human being can be reduced to the act of beating their mirror image to death.
It seems inevitable that such an act would complete the utter dissolution of the self that James seems to suffer. Beating anyone, or anything, to death would be hard to fathom for even the most depraved of people, but beating yourself to death would perhaps be even harder to comprehend. Not just because the idea of doppelgangers seems like something out of a fairy tale, but because the bond we have with ourselves is unlike any other. We are bound to ourselves in an indefinable, permanent way. While we all know what it’s like for the idea of who we are to morph, or even crack, then repair, over the different phases of our lives, the idea of such a bond breaking completely would be almost impossible to understand.
After all, how do we live not knowing who we are? And how do we fit into the world, into our lives as we once knew them? At the end of Infinity Pool, we see James change his mind about going home. He chooses to stay at the resort, comfortable there because it’s where his journey of loss, and perhaps discovery, started andended, if there even really is an end. It’s clear to us, the audience, that he would not know how to exist in the outside world, how to settle back into his work, his routine, his daily life, as the thing he has become. He has lost his values, his morals, his self, and so he chooses to exile himself from the world that gave him those things in the first place.
In Possessor, we know that Vos’ place in society is strained by her loss of self, but more importantly we see how it affects her family unit. Her husband and son are estranged from her, and it’s made clear that the severing of any emotional ties, especially familial, is expected of the assassins in order to perform the job well. We can see that Vos struggles with this demand for objectivity against her love for her family — yet we can also see from the start that she already feels disconnected from them and disconnected from herself. The job may demand that she make this separation, but it also seems that the nature of the job would eventually force such a detachment from anyone, no matter how willing they are.
It’s that age-old notion that a person can be broken down completely, before being remodelled as necessary. This sort of attitude is often attributed to prisons and the military, where the idea of moulding someone to a certain standard is still an unsettling prospect but arguably a beneficial one. Whether or not it works is too complicated a question to answer here, but we do see it working within the movie — not due to any emotional abuse, torture or manipulation but due to the violent displacement of consciousness from one body, into another.
Where James sees himself looking back at him with his doppelgangers, Vos sees a stranger. Not only is she visually unrecognisable to herself, she must also act, playing the part of the stranger so convincingly that those close to the victim remain unsuspecting. She has to immerse herself in the world, the life, of this stranger, become them, and in so doing, lose herself. Whether or not this can be reversed is questionable — Vos may return to her body and reconnect with herself to an extent, but the implication of the film is that this connection is worn down a little more each time, and that, if left unchecked, this damage can be critical.
And eventually, we see that it does become critical. Her willpower is whittled down to such an extent that Colin, the man whose body she possesses for most of the film, begins to regain his control over himself. The lines between them are blurred, their selves almost mingling into one indistinguishable consciousness. It isn’t clear by the end who is in control, whose will is being acted on, or whether Vos is still lucid in any sense of the word. Like James, she loses herself, her resolve and sanity — she completely dissolves within the man she has been fighting to control. All that’s seemingly left of her is the body that represents her, laying beneath the machine.
Even when Vos does wake up, we have to question whether she is really there in any real sense of the word. She may be able to move, speak and answer questions, but there is a sense that she is going through the motions, giving her answers only through pure memory and not through any sense of connecting to what she is saying, or supposedly remembering. Perhaps she is just reeling from the film’s events, willingly detached out of self-protection rather than a forced loss of control. Either way, at this point, it’s clear that Vos’ detachment is grave, if not permanent — not just from the gradual breakdown of her own individual sense of self, but from the death of her entire family.
It might be tempting to think this isn’t scary because there’s no risk of it happening to us. The worlds of Infinity Pool and Possessor are fantastical, with technology the likes of which we can only ever dream of. But the concept of losing ourselves, the very real phenomenon of detachment, is all around us and always has been. These films may not be scary for everyone, but they are terrifying for many, because they reflect issues within the real world all too well.
Certainly, there is no strange resort making doubles of people anywhere in the real world (that we know of), and no machine that can transplant anyone’s consciousness, but that’s only surface level. Well-known party destinations like Ibiza and Majorca in Spain attract the kind of drunken revellers that might parallel the group in Infinity Pool — stories abound of tourists leaping from hotel balconies, preying on women and even overdosing on alcohol, drugs, or both — so much so that Spain is in the process of enforcing a limit on drinking in certain areas to curtail these issues.
Perhaps these people feel somewhat immune to the law or any kind of social etiquette while on holiday, and thus they feel free to disengage. It does make some sense — it’s a widespread attitude that once the out-of-office is on and the bags are packed you’re on holiday, and the responsibilities of home, work and domesticity no longer apply. We enter into a different mindset and disconnect somewhat from our routine self. Depending on how far this disconnection goes, there’s no wonder that such revelry and madness as happens in party resorts often goes unchecked. And, if the technology available in Infinity Pool was available in the real world, there’s no doubt in my mind that it would be readily taken advantage of by those who could afford it.
But even if you’re not the partying type, Possessor proves that the pressure of work and home can be just as dangerous. Vos is, after all, living as normal life as she can despite the abstract nature of her job. It isn’t unusual to hear people of all professions talk of being on autopilot, not just during work hours, but even at home where the added responsibilities of housework and children add up. Enough stress, and people will detach — that is, after all, the basis of a number of mental health disorders, like PTSD, dissociation, and the controversial Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Detachment, and the loss of who we are, is terrifying because it can happen to anyone. We may not suffer a complete ego death because of the pressures of work or drinking a bit too much while on holiday, but the possibility is always there depending on what life throws at us, and that is never within our control. However secure we may feel in who we are and how well we know ourselves, we really are only a single step away from the edge. That’s something we’ve always known and feared. The Ancient Greeks, Socrates in particular, mused on it. During the 19th century, Lovecraft, in many of his incredible stories, wrote about what a shaky hold we really have on our own sanity. And now, in the modern age, Brandon Cronenberg has, once again, masterfully put it to screen, not for the first time, and likely not for the last time.
