Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft, the film he has been promoting in his signature method of rambling, incoherent interviews as some kind of experiment in post-cinematic sensory experience, offers up all it has to show you by the thirty minute mark of it’s fleeting 80 minute runtime. The primary trick up the film’s sleeve — the auspicious aesthetic decision to exclusively film with infrared cameras — creates the distancing effect Korine was no doubt aiming for. Aggro Dr1ft is permanently awash in a swirling blend of blue, orange, red, and purple heat signatures that, depending on the scene, can disorient, horrify, or cause one’s mind to drift into a hallucinogenic state of euphoria. Even with the brevity of the film’s runtime, however, the infrared look has just enough time to run its course and feel less and less like some bold stylistic innovation from an outsider artist and more like a hastily decided upon gimmick the more the film endures.
Lost and wandering in a deluge of constantly bleeding fluorescent colors that casts the Floridian coastline in a nightmarish haze, a hit man named Bo (Jordi Molla) monologues through his melancholy and proclaims his proficiency at killing for profit. From what you are able to make out over the cacophonous, oppressive electronica soundtrack and the unlevel sound mixing that renders all recorded dialogue a staticky drone, Bo is a loving father and husband, but his profession assassinating (literally) colorful ganglords and drug kingpins physically and emotionally disconnects him from his family. Puttering around the enveloping thermal signatures of Florida in his luxury sports car on a mission to kill a demon masquerading as a speedo-clad, samurai sword wielding, pelvic-thrusting, foul-mouthed gangster surrounded by scantily-clad women and machete wielding little people, Bo repeatedly airs his disgust over the dehumanizing violence he and his targets commit into the polychromatic void. As animated H.R. Giger-esque patterns of mechanical tendons squirm over the faceless figures he passes by and augmented reality demons crack open and loom menacingly over the hazy skies above him, Bo’s incessant, flat observations repeat over the soundtrack as he drifts towards the one target that could call his claim of being the world’s greatest killer into question. Also, concurrently somewhere on a yacht in the Straits of Florida, Bo’s protege(?) Zion (Travis Scott) and an assembled team of masked assassins party sorrowfully next to a hot-tub filled with twerking women while occasionally pointing their guns at the camera. Zion has a snake tongue.
The tone-establishing opening sequence of an incoherent muttering Bo ruthlessly drowning his target in an infinity pool in the rain, colors percolating over his designer assassin gear and the defamiliarized look of the human body, represents an initial shock to the system the meandering remainder of Aggro Dr1ft refuses to capitalize or expand on. Under Korine’s rambling direction which leaves scenes lingering and often repeating in his incoherent decoupage, all semblance of narrative deliberately takes a backseat to the proverbial “vibe” the filmmaker hopes to establish. Bo’s “quest” to slay some demon holed up in a palatial mansion where anonymous women are tormented and kept captive in cages doesn’t matter. The character’s melancholy over his work and the distance it creates from his family is unimportant. The team of assassins he dubs interchangeably as the Children of Zion or the Rainbow Children whose sadboi yacht party takes up the entirety of the film’s second act ultimately leads to nothing. Plot, never the “be all and end all” of the cinematic experience, can effectively be subservient to that intangible but instantly felt quality of vibe in Korine’s vision.
In the case of Aggro Dr1ft, the vibes are off. Seeking inspiration from the medium of gaming and befitting an self-described edgelord, Korine patterns the film after the narrative and visual limitations of a cutscene from an early 2000s video game. Dialogue repeats like it’s being generated by NPCs, Bo moves leisurely like he is being piloted by a slightly tilted analog stick, and the 3D models of skeletal demons dotting the purple/blue/yellow/orange Floridian sky resemble something you’d place your crosshairs on in “DOOM.” Chasing the disquieting slacker ecstasy of an intense session of playing “Grand Theft Auto Vice City” on a busted tube television, Korine’s film has the entertainment value of a subpar let’s play video. Much like the aloof reasoning underlying the choice of infrared cameras — that all-important vibe — the gimmick of ludonarrative hanging over Aggro Dr1ft‘s hazy, digressive story is only engaging on a surface level
It is disheartening to see the ever provocative Korine rest on his laurels and seek to be carried by a vibe instead of piloting one through his idiosyncratic style and maverick perspective. Engaging only in small spurts, Aggro Dr1ft does not come across as the daring evolution of cinema its director supposedly envisioned as little substance can be extracted from its belabored aesthetic and narrative stunts. The primary tragedy of Aggro Dr1ft is that these gimmicks Korine employs carry sensuous potential the director does not fully commit to. He points these nontraditional cameras at his usual subject matter — the less fortunate, the depraved, and the bizarre existing on the margins of society a la Gummo and Trash Humpers — in the misplaced hope this unusual filter would speak volumes while his script and direction only murmurs in a drug-addled state. As much as I’d like to say Aggro Dr1ft is a vibe, its ideas lack the longevity to last beyond its initial shock. It remains a curiosity even within the deeply curious filmography of Korine, but at least his other movies felt like more than a contrived gimmick.
