Ten years after “Spring Breakers,” the neon pinks and greens of Harmony Korine’s mainstream breakthrough return in an Internet-inflected and even more abstract ode to the thug life, with seriously mixed results. To call “Aggro Dr1ft” stupid or silly isn’t wrong, but it is missing the point. The dialogue is incredibly banal and hilariously repetitive, the story a thin assemblage of clichés. But the images!
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Shot in thermal lens, its characters look like figures in a video game where the colors have gone all wrong, but they also seem undeniably real, the camera capturing details too human to be artificially generated. It’s a paradox Korine consciously leans on with a genuinely interesting visual idea: for a few seconds at a time, the camera appears to look deeper into the characters, revealing metallic and robotic structures at their cores that suggest they may not be human at all.
It looks very cool, and emphasizes the feeling of all present being little more than NPCs with potentially harmful intent towards our hero, Bo (Jordi Mollà). The long-haired man of average build is, somewhat unconvincingly and in what might be the film’s first goofy detail, a hired killer: “I was born to kill” is the first of his many very dramatic statements, spoken with a faint Spanish accent but which, together with the otherworldly images, help paint the Miami of the film as a dangerous world ruled by cruel criminals. This makes Bo some kind of dark angel whose job is to rid the place of “demons,” as he calls the targets he is assigned.
The omnipresent score of electronic drones and electropop melodies by AraabMuzik encouraged some walkouts when played at ear-splitting volume during the Venice press screening I attended, but it does contribute to the film’s experiential dimension. “Aggro Dr1ft” is trippy, its images often incredibly gorgeous and totally unique, and we wish we could simply let ourselves drift through its uncanny world.
Several things, unfortunately, prevent us from doing so. Bo’s voiceover, first of all, is hilarious: speaking in short sentences that are either very cheesy (“I am the world’s greatest assassin”; “I am a hero”) or utterly banal aphorisms (“All I want is love. Remove violence. Stop. Stop.”). He sounds like late-Malick protagonists, but only if they were really high.
After the killing that opens the film, Bo speeds through the pink and blue expanses of Miami in his shiny car to meet his wife and children at home, where he talks at length about how much he loves them and how they should never know what he does for a living. “Stay with us!” meanwhile, is the repeated mantra of his curvaceous wife. These repetitions make clear that these figures are ideas more than they are people, archetypes that serve a simple purpose and speak in the strangely unnatural manner of video game characters. But Bo’s voiceover and the basic dialogue, though funny and even fascinating at first, become a hindrance in the long term. These strange voices — all set to the same level in the soundmix, as they would be in a primitive game — prevent us from reaching true heights of psychedelic abstraction. So does the film’s languid pace, even though it is obviously inspired by the rhythm of open-world games like “Elden Ring” or, indeed, “Grand Theft Auto.” Like other films by Korine, “Aggro Dr1ft” could have transcended its materiality to become something clichéd and simple yet genuinely beautiful, an endearingly naïve work like “Spring Breakers” or even “Gummo.”
Korine has spoken in interviews about potentially showing the film not through a standard theatrical release but “as a rave.” This could work since it is at its best when it remains a sensory experience, but as a movie, it’s visually rapturous and yet still a little bit banal. [C]
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