As a chip off the old block, Brandon Cronenberg lacks his father’s ability to connect a viewer emotionally to the outrageous images he conjures up, unless you consider disgust an emotion. Whereas David Cronenberg’s patented body horror has something to do with the imagination, Brandon’s is wholly visceral in that he shows in almost loving detail how violence affects flesh and bone. In his first film, Possessor, various remotely controlled assassins find creative ways of killing that seem extreme compared to the usual cinematic hitman m.o., but I hesitate to call it gratuitous because the nature of a remotely controlled assassin, by definition, can’t be clearly understood. However, in Cronenberg fils’ new movie the violence, the sex, and particularly the cruelty are clearly gratuitous, because the story is so catastrophically ridiculous, even on an allegorical level. The movie doesn’t generate enough confidence in its premise to render the gross-out elements as anything but pointless provocations.

Since the subjects of the movie are rich white folk, the cruelty, wherever positioned and pointed, is taken for granted. The setting is a fictional tropical country where the resorts are separated from the poor inhabitants by barbed wire fences. James (Alexander Skarsgård), a blocked novelist, and his wealthy publishing heir wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), are vacationing here when they meet CM actress Gabi (Mia Goth) and her French architect husband Alban (Jalil Lespert). Gabi attaches herself to James because she loved his one novel, attention that flatters the monumentally insecure writer to no end. After the two couples borrow a car—a vintage Cadillac, no less—and take a forbidden drive off the resort compound to frolic on a deserted beach, James hits a local while driving drunk and kills the man. Though they try to sneak back into the compound the police catch up to them and the head detective (Thomas Kretschmann) informs them that the law of the country dictates that the son of someone killed by another person has the right to kill that person himself. But this country also has a loophole for those who can afford it: The authorities will produce a clone of the condemned and have that clone killed in the condemned’s place—while the condemned watches. Though stupid, this high concept is exactly the kind of thing that brings out the creative in Cronenberg, and the gory sequence that shows how it works reveals an original, if downright sick, imagination.

But that’s not the end of the silliness. James, forced to watch his own mutilation, gets turned on by it, and he is soon welcomed into a secret society of privileged seasonal regulars who’ve been through the same thing and now get their rocks off by throwing off all social and moral constraints and doing whatever they like, including killing and raping, because they can always pay for clones to receive the punishment. Though I can understand the message Cronenberg is pushing, the means of delivery make me wonder if he also doesn’t get off on it. The characters just fall deeper and deeper into depravity with no ethical or rational reckoning. Meanwhile, the director gooses the repellant images with odd camera angles and a slick electronic score from Tim Hecker in an attempt to turn it all into entertainment. It felt more like punishment.

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

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photo (c) 2022 Infinity (FFP) Movie Canada Inc., Infinity Squared KFT. Cetiri Film d.o.o.