Harmony Korine, the enfant terrible of fucked up (Gummo), often proudly inane (Trash Humpers) arthouse moviemaking, has watched his anarchic style be replicated ad infinitum. Young filmmakers want to make work that feels like his, but that often instead feels more like a pastiche or bad imitation, playing with his ideas but seldom replicating his spirit. Perhaps Harmony is aware of this, and is keen to remind his contemporaries of the trappings of nostalgia: AGGRO DR1FT looks and sounds nothing like his previous films, but is teeming with that spirit, which runs through it like a lurid gulp of Monster energy drink.
It’s a narrative feature that wears that label like a parasite, trying at every turn to expel it. Instead, it’s best to see AGGRO DR1FT as a work of audiovisual violence: an affront to just about every standard code of cinema and good taste, convincing you of its greatness by abrading the senses. Shot entirely using thermal lens, as if gazing through the viewfinder of a Bond villain’s heat-seeking weapon, the film is rendered in deep blues, oranges, yellows and reds, like a child’s paint pot. (It also makes use of computer game-style graphics and AI effects, which scramble like tattoos over characters’ bodies as they move.) Similarly, its ear-splitting sound design, pitchy and intense, was so loud in the film’s press screening that several journalists put in earplugs for protection. It is a film intent on causing annihilation.
For the sake of context, a loose plot: in modern day Miami, an assassin named BO — who cruises the streets in his sports car carrying out hits on criminals and snitches — is presented with a hit so important that it will change his life. His target is an evil killer who often manifests as a sea-stomping, hundreds of feet-tall, computer-generated creature. In human form, said villain spends the entire film shirtless in his mansion, surrounded by little people in devil masks and women in bikinis. But there are some personal stakes for BO here: the job is dangerous, and the assassin has a wife and children waiting for him at home.
This plot is followed only vaguely over the film’s 80 minutes, often being forgotten about entirely. (It’s worth noting the film has no credited screenwriter.) Instead, the dialogue is practically performance art, like AI-written gibberish. Our protagonist speaks in disjointed, often nonsensical voiceovers — “I am an assassin, I am a husband” — detached from what we are watching on screen. When Travis Scott’s character Zion appears, a protege to BO, they have a conversation that ultimately sees Zion ask if Julius Caesar was the guy who wrote the Bible. Whether this was ad-libbed is unclear.
The villain, meanwhile, sounds like the final boss in a PS2 fantasy video game from 2004, at one point repeatedly shouting variations of “dance for daddy, bitches” as a bunch of bikini-clad women writhe around him in an abandoned parking lot. At home, we see POV shots of the assassin’s wife, as a voiceover says “we miss you baby”, all while she performs the splits and lightly ass claps on her own marital bed. Harmony has already said that Grand Theft Auto was a key reference point in the film’s creation.
It does not pass the Bechdel test.
But what Harmony Korine does is make films to fuck with you. He’s spoken recently about his retirement from the kind of conventional cinema he is bored of making, instead turning his hand to the world of tech: video games, AI, TikTok. If this is his example of how these mediums can make interesting visual art, then it does – in theory – work. You are part hypnotised by, part subjected to this film. It’s all heavy breathing and twerking and spaced-out voiceover. It’s often thrilling, regularly hilarious. A film made with such a lack of self-seriousness that you can’t help but admire the results.
Rumour has it that, during the film’s first screening for the press at Venice Film Festival, Harmony himself was somewhere in the room. What he would have witnessed were shaking heads, mass walk-outs and, as the name of his new production company EDGLRD (yes, really) blasted on to the screen at the end credits, a smattering of boos and supportive applause. But for Harmony Korine, that seems like the ideal result: a positive consensus is a death sentence for the movies that he makes.
‘AGGRO DR1FT’ has no distributor. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival 2023.