Every once in a while, as a critic, I find myself asking, “What have I gotten myself into?” I’m not talking about bad films here, necessarily– those are, of course, part of the job, and as someone who was raised on b-movie dregs and MST3K I can withstand a lot of punishment. Rather, I’m talking about the unclassifiable: the films which exist so far outside the bounds of “good” or “bad” or “a movie” that they’re difficult to describe, much less critique. These sorts of films are, by definition, rare, but they pose a unique conundrum: how does one “rate” a film which is intentionally so unlike pretty much any other film in the history of the medium.
When these films do appear, there’s a better than average chance they come courtesy of Harmony Korine. Whether you love his work or hate it (and there are plenty in either camp) it is impossible to deny that Korine has pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of remaining an enfant terrible for over thirty years; it’s tough to imagine many filmmakers of his ‘90s Sundance vintage releasing something like his 2009 VHS nightmare Trash Humpers, let alone follow it with an unlikely quasi-mainstream provocation like Spring Breakers. Korine’s latest, AGGRO DR1FT, is arguably his most far-out feature film yet, and one which may try the patience of even the Harmonically inclined. It’s the damnedest thing, and while I’m not quite sure I can say it’s a “good” “movie,” I sure as hell admire that he’s gotten it into theaters.
The “plot” of AGGRO DR1FT largely boils down to this: there is a hitman. The hitman, named Bo (played by Spanish movie star Jordi Mollà), has an adoring wife and kids, but he has to leave them for long stretches in order to dispatch assorted denizens of the underworld. But AGGRO DR1FT is not particularly concerned with things like plot; indeed, there isn’t even a credited screenwriter. Instead, the vibe is the thing. AGGRO DR1FT is, to the best of my knowledge, the first feature film shot entirely with infrared thermal imaging cameras, which are then layered with AI filters and other glitch effects. There is dialogue and narration (primarily Mollà muttering things like “I am the world’s… greatest assassin,” or “Dropping bodies… dropping souls…”), but it’s buried deep in the mix of the wall-to-wall synth score by Providence musician AraabMuzik. It is, in short, a lot.
When I saw Korine several years ago for a Harvard Film Archive screening of Trash Humpers (a film which, for the record, I adore), he opened the Q&A with the bemused, rhetorical question, “Is this even a movie?” AGGRO DR1FT begs that question even further. It doesn’t really move like a film; a more apt comparison might be a long-form music video, or an animated blacklight poster, or– perhaps closest to the point– a non-playable demo for a nonexistent video game. This is not a film which carries you from Plot Point A to Plot Point B, as most films– particularly action films– tend to do. This is a film which invites you to simply exist within it for 80 minutes, and to periodically mutter, “Cooooool!”
And you know what? It is cool. Simply put, there has never been a movie like AGGRO DR1FT; everything from the look to the fundamental grammar of its filmmaking feels like it was custom-built from the ground up. By pushing its aesthetic to the brink of recognizability, everything looks alien and wondrous, from Bo’s endlessly twerking wife to the towering demon which represents his sense of existential dread. Bo’s chief adversary, a mob boss with a constantly flapping pair of eagle wings, is an arresting and terrifying image (I think he’s also wearing one of Korine’s Trash Humpers masks, but it’s tough to tell through all the visual noise). And Korine’s trademark sense of off-kilter humor is discernible through the digital haze, as in a lengthy scene in which the only line of dialog, repeated at least a dozen times, is “Dance, bitches!”
Hell, for that matter, the entire thing could be seen as a joke on Korine’s part– yet another trick played on the audience by one of cinema’s preeminent pranksters. I think there’s certainly a degree of that at play here (as there is in pretty much everything he does), but I do think it also represents an earnest degree of artistic exploration. You don’t make a film like this by accident, and there’s certainly a lot of effort on display for a piss-take. What’s more, it definitively fits within Korine’s recent oeuvre, a tone-piece variation on the beach-blitzed weirdness of Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum. It’s not a departure, really; it may just be the purest distillation of Korine’s “thing” yet.
Which brings us to the hard part of this review. How does one define a movie as “good” or “bad” when there is so little within the medium to compare it against? I can say for sure that a lot of people will absolutely hate this; I can also say that I had a pretty great time with it. Ultimately, I’m going to vote in its favor, because I want to see more stuff like this– not thermal-vision, necessarily, but wild formal swings, particularly from filmmakers who can afford to take the chance. AGGRO DR1FT is as bewildering a work as has ever been seen from a mainstream artist; it shares more than a little DNA with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, and I’ll leave it up to you whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Movies like this may make my job harder as a critic, but god, I wish there were more of them.
AGGRO DR1FT
2023
dir. Harmony Korine
80 min.
Now playing at Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport
Also screening Friday, 5/17 and Saturday, 5/18, 11:59pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
