In 2020, right before the start of the pandemic, Brandon Cronenberg made me ill. Possessor, his excellent second directorial feature, bored its way into my brain as surely as the fictional device its corporate assassins used on their victims. Its protagonist un-mothered, shed her skin, and become something fully stripped of anything close to human.

Similar, if not parallel, trajectories awaited Alexander Skaarsgard’s character in Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool.