At last year’s Venice Film Festival, Harmony Korine took a wild left-turn with Aggro Dr1ft, the first feature from his new production company EDGLRD. The mystery movie, shot in infrared and intentionally devoid of any recognizable cinematic mode or style, left audiences more confused than when they went in (if they lasted).
It garnered more boos and angry walkouts than anything at the fest, but also amassed a near-religious following of fans overnight. Needless to say, the EDGLRD table has been set and the people are as eager to spit out the new food as they are to devour it. It’s good timing, then, that one year later, Korine is back with his second: Baby Invasion. Where to begin?
There’s an apt version of a Baby Invasion review that starts and ends with “you just have to see it.” No matter how granular someone gets, the sensory-annihilating singular experience will be left on the table, uncapturable with words, hardly capturable with cinema. It is a genreless (avant-garde or horror would be the closest bets) onslaught of violence, creativity, and livestream gaming sensibilities that morph by the minute––to nonstop skull-throttling techno by Burial––without any discernible logic.
Well, there’s user-logic, but you’re not the user. So it’s more like watching someone play a video game. The game in question? “Baby Invaders,” a first-person shooter in which the player must carry out mansion invasions with his mercenary buds (affectionately known as “Duck Mobb”) and explore all mind-bending “rabbit holes” before time runs out. The fellow home invaders have black hoodies, AI-generated baby faces, and EDGLRD-brand horn helmets that render them, frankly, terrifying.
The camera is user-toggled––quickly scanning, erroneously drifting, hanging too long on certain spaces, covering and recovering the same ground, whipping and stalling out erratically––and typically set in a superwide lens. (It takes 20 minutes of said exploratory toggling before the burglary even begins.) The ever-wandering pace, long takes, user-generated motion, and bowled-out lens are reminiscent of Victoria Pereda’s daring camerawork in Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge 3, the closest thing Baby Invasion has to an influence that isn’t Twitch-based.
Let’s go somewhere else. Left turn three times in a row. Into a pause menu. Into a neverending mini-game of shootable pink men. Into a hostage-like recording from the game’s developer in Mexico, who speaks fearfully of Romanian hackers and games so real they trap players in a waking trance, making them incapable of separating reality and fiction. One element appears while another dissolves. Here are five new elements. Take two of them away. Here are seven. What are the elements, you ask? They can be anything, but here are some examples that hardly scratch the surface:
Livestream comments flow down the left side of the screen for at least two-thirds of the film. Explorable rooms are strewn with collectable, hovering gold coins and ground-glowing save points. A grave female narrator voices over abstract existential and philosophical one-liners every 5-30 seconds for the entire runtime. She speaks endlessly of the rabbit and its journey. A prompt box asks if we’d like to purchase pills. Tiny, Tamagotchi-esque versions of Duck Mobb babies run across the midriff of the frame, logographic script bursting out inexplicably above them.
A dialogue box constantly reappears with hints and objectives from other Duck Mobb members. There is a main user who wears a rasta-colored EDGLRD mask over his face to whom we regularly return, his webcam frame usually shoved into the top-right corner of the image, per livestreaming format. At one point we watch him play a minigame through a prismatic cube-tube portal with an infinite loop of screens all around, inching back and forth through the mind-numbing space aimlessly. The user decides to take a shit in the invaded mansion for a couple minutes and revel in it.
The score is brash, unrelenting, and ever-changing throughout, adding layers of anxiety to every second of the experience. An AI-generated image of a rabbit crossing a field in a thunderstorm suddenly dissolves onscreen; within three seconds it’s gone. Rainbow pastel lines glitch into place on the bodies of bound hostages as they writhe on the ground, their faces digitally erased with dots. We back through the wall, out of the field of play, and see the game blueprint graphics for a minute, reality transformed into digital DNA. A charcoal-steel, babyface-only being who resides in the ocean (see: poster) makes a near-holy appearance. The list of mind-bending curiosities goes on.
Baby Invasion is capital-A Art, a new standard for cinematic absurdism in which every audio-visual element is thrown to the wind. It’s less interested in entertaining than it is in pushing boundaries, the kind of work made to start a conversation about what movies are, what “rules,” frameworks, and devices they’ve outgrown––the kind of film made to stretch and challenge our idea of cinema, to get us thinking about the ways it can evolve. And Korine bashes us over the head tirelessly with the conversation, as he’s always done best.
For how punishing, repetitive, and twitchy it is, Baby Invasion is even more thought-provoking when you get beyond the surface-level insanity of it all. The pioneering 80-minute multimedia project is a mammoth undertaking, bewildering in its unique ability to make you wonder. What am I looking at? What am I feeling? Where the fuck did all of these ideas come from? How did they manage to lean into the bit hard enough to pull it off? What did they even pull off?
Almost immediately, Korine’s point comes through loud and clear: it’s time for cinema to change. For someone, anyone––hell, he’ll do it!––to turn the medium on its head. Baby Invasion’s feature watchability aside, Korine’s new chapter is a tectonic experimental development for the film industry, a step in the right direction towards uncharted territory by nature of exploration and originality alone. It’s sure to infuriate many, but in art history it’s people and projects like these that ultimately affect real change, or at least signal its coming.
Baby Invasion premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.