Is Aggro Dr1ft the future of cinema? Not in any quantifiable, justifiable sense. Does it have anything to say? I admire Harmony Korine using infrared images and abstract editing to convey anxieties about growing older, being a married man, and acting as father to two children in a violent world. Did I laugh at the angel-winged, sword-wielding, gravel-voiced bad guy saying, “Dance bitches. Dance bitches. Dance bitch. Dance bitches”? Well…
After a contentious run on the fall-festival circuit, where people either had to declare Aggro Dr1ft was putting a stake in cinema’s heart by righteously pissing on the graves of Eadweard Muybridge and Orson Welles or an embarrassment for which Korine should be ashamed––I propose it’s sufficient to think “this looks kind of neat” and occasionally laugh across 80 fleet-enough minutes––Korine’s EDGLRD is beginning their roll-out of the film at the Los Angeles strip club Crazy Girls on February 7, and with it a new trailer has arrived.
One can get a quick taste of Aggro Dr1ft‘s aggressive, abrasive sense therein––safe to say if this amuses, you’ll get something from the film at large. As Rory O’Connor said from his review out of Venice, “Korine has named this new aesthetic ‘gamecore,’ which seems pretty apt. Even the most casual player will recognize the rhythms and visual cues here: the actors move and converse like NPCs, repeating phrases and gestures, and moving around with all the personality of an avatar in Second Life. A satanic demon is forever appearing on the horizon. It’s like you’ve logged into somebody’s unhinged Twitch stream. For all it lacks in other areas, however, it mostly compensates in the sheer audacity of its ideas. The film’s aesthetic is also genuinely new: filmed in Miami (like much of his recent output), the city hums with the infrared lens’ neon hues. The AI adds a dynamic second skin to the actors that recalls the early images of Google’s Deep Dream. In the moments when everything clicks, it creates something thrillingly novel.”
Find the preview below: