'AGGRO DR1FT' review: The thrill is gone
Harmony Korine's infrared experiment is strangely inert
In Harmony Korine’s abstract nightmare Trash Humpers, he creates a series of VHS-recorded vignettes featuring people in elderly person masks committing acts of depravity (including the titular garbage sex).
A moniker is repeated throughout the movie in a frighteningly high-pitched and memorable tone: “Make it! Make it! Don’t fake it!”
I’ve found this line to be a kind of Rosetta Stone for Korine, whose films are marked by images of rapid-fire authenticity that spit in the face of respectability and audience expectations. For all the provocation, though, there’s often an indelible earnestness at their core.
Take his most mainstream work, Spring Breakers, a neon pop fever dream that isn’t afraid to wax philosophical as it shows a group of female college students rampaging across Florida. When I refer to him as a sleazier Terrence Malick, I do so lovingly.
All of this to say, I’m a semi-unapologetic fan of Korine. I get why people don’t like him, but I do! This is why it brings me no joy to report that his latest film is easily his weakest, a visual experiment that feels strangely inert.
While AGGRO DR1FT is another Florida-set odyssey, it is a decidedly stranger beast than Spring Breakers or his 2019 film The Beach Bum.
Shot entirely in infrared, it largely focuses on an assassin, Bo (Jordi Mollà), going after a depraved crime lord (Joshua Tilley). We see him with his wife and kids, chatting it up with a protege (Travis Scott), and stalking his prey across yachts, strip clubs, and mansions.
Much of AGGRO DR1FT feels like an experimental remake of the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: Criminals are swept up in a web of betrayal and revenge, women are largely displayed as sexualized props, and the violence, while brief, is grotesque enough that Congress would probably call hearings about it if this were the 2000s.
The movie is less jarringly cut than Korine’s previous films, but that seems like a strategy that allows him to crowd the frame with an often-overwhelming level of visual detail.
Not only do the subjects appear rainbow-tinged, but Korine abruptly shifts the palette, sometimes within shots. Some characters are also animated to have wings, horns, or machinery whirring away over their limbs. More than once, a giant demon can be seen in the distance, as if Satan himself is cheering Bo on. (I consider that beast a directorial stand-in).
These additions give the movie an air of apocalyptic fantasy, though Korine is content to tread water with the premise rather than push his experiment into any new or interesting artistic directions. I’ve heard people refer to this as a midlife crisis movie, though that doesn’t feel quite right to me. The Beach Bum was clearly one as well, but it works because it shares a sense of comradery with the chaotic poet at its center.
AGGRO DR1FT, by comparison, feels detached. It’s a retrograde playground devoid of heart.
AGGRO DR1FT is now playing in select theaters.