A Jean-Luc Godard for the Grand Theft Auto generation, Harmony Korine has turned increasingly experimental in his latter-day career, shunning coherent narrative or conventional cinematic grammar. The veteran indie auteur, who penned the controversial Kids (1995) before turning to directing with Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) and more, has always existed on the margins, but Baby Invasion is his most luridly extreme art-punk statement yet.
As a piece of boundary-pushing audio-visual entertainment, Baby Invasion is undeniably an impressively wild ride, with a supersaturated maximalist aesthetic that draws from computer games, VR and AR, music videos and digital glitch art. But as a work of cinema aimed at actual humans, it very soon becomes repetitive and tedious, falling back on the over-familiar fixations of an ageing enfant terrible still stuck in the teenage provocateur mode that launched his career 30 years ago. At times it becomes borderline unwatchable, but such is the steep price of maintaining your status as cinema’s undefeated champion of post-modern hipster nihilism. Following its world premiere out of competition in Venice this week, it should find an indulgent welcome in arty-party fashionista circles, but will leave most viewers bored, baffled or bleeding from the ears. Possibly all three.
Baby Invasion riffs on themes that have obsessed Korine since his breakthrough indie hit Spring Breakers (2012): neon-saturated Florida locations, armed gangs in ski masks, drugs and guns, booming EDM soundtracks and first-person-shooter computer-game visuals. He pushed this supercharged music-video aesthetic to experimental extremes on his previous film, the delirious assassin thriller Aggro Dr1ft (2023), and he explores it further here with a sense-pummelling riot of heavily treated footage, a blend of real and virtual, all set to a techno score by cult underground British electronic musician Burial, aka Will Bevan.
The tongue-in-cheek conceit behind Baby Invasion is that a work-in-progress computer game about baby-faced killers on crime rampages has leaked onto the dark web, where it caught the attention of real armed criminals. These gangs have somehow learned how to overlay their real live-streamed home invasions with video game-play, which digitally pastes sinister baby graphics over on their actual faces, alongside hallucinatory video effects, scrolling comments, on-screen text banners and other relentlessly busy visual noise.
Normally associated with brooding ambient soundscapes, Burial’s thumping score has a harsh and dirty feel here, a throwback to the early days of UK rave music. His seamless, pounding audio track drives the film forward, overlaid with a soothingly sinister female voice relating a surreal, interminable monologue about rabbits.
The flimsy dramatic premise of Baby Invasion barely stands up to scrutiny, but Korine has scant interest in plot logic anyway. He just needs a loose excuse to bombard viewers with retina-scorching footage of heavily armed gangs rampaging through mansions, rounding up the inhabitants, swimming in their pools, emptying their safes and stealing their riches. These loopy, interminable, time-scrambled attack sequences typically end in mass murder, but for some reason Korine does not show any actual killings, just their bloody aftermath. There is a high body count here, including real babies and wheelchair users.
Baby Invasion is the second feature Korine has made under the banner of his Miami-based production company EDGLRD, whose output encompasses music videos, advertising campaigns, DJ parties and spin-off merchandise, including expensive signature demon masks. A cynic might see this film as a fairly brazen exercise in brand promotion, a more generous observer might embrace the entire project as one giant artwork. In fairness, there are moments of trippy, head-spinning beauty here, notably when Korine pulls back from directly observing the crime scenes with striking monochrome heat-vision dance sequences and screen-warping abstract video collages. More of these imaginative digressions might have elevated an otherwise drainingly monotonous viewing experience.
Korine marked the Venice launch of Baby Invasion with a semi-coherent press conference which was more performance-art stunt than serious discussion. Accompanied by mask-wearing entourage, including his fellow ageing bad-boy director Gaspar Noé, who had unspecified input into the film, Korine claimed that the actors on screen are actually real burglars arrested while robbing real houses in Miami. Yeah, sure, why not?
The director also declared cinema a dying art form and encouraged Hollywood studios to listen to “the kids”, specifically teenage influencers and YouTube stars, an amusing but slightly desperate posture from a 50-year-old director. Thus Korine joins the long tradition of film-makers, from Godard to Peter Geenaway to Nicolas Winding Refn, to announce cinema’s demise. Of course, this usually just means the director himself has become jaded and hit a creative dead end.
As Elon Musk proves, few things are less shocking than a middle-aged millionaire who is still desperate to shake up conventional bourgeois liberal values. This is especially true when their idea of “edgy” boils down to the same tiresome macho clichés of guns, drugs, crime, stolen money, bikini-clad beauties and borrowed underclass rage. Behind its superficially avant-garde aesthetic, Baby Invasion is a shallow, conservative, masturbatory piece of work. It leaves behind an uncomfortable choice: either Korine has run out of anything interesting to say, or he has actually been trolling us all along.
Director: Harmony Korine
Production designer: Elliott Hostetter
Costume designer: Lina Palacios
Music: Burial
Visual Effects: Joao Rosa/EDGLRD
Production companies: EDGLRD (US), Picture Perfect (US)
World sales: CAA
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)
In English
80 minutes
