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Sep 2, 2023 · ‘Spring Breakers’ director Harmony Korine unveiled 'AGGRO DR1FT,' a Miami-set hitman thriller that co-stars Travis Scott, in Venice.
May 10, 2024 · Release Date May 10, 2024. Duration 1 h 20 m. Genres. Action. Crime. Drama. Breaking away from the traditional parameters of cinema, AGGRO DR1FT explores the onslaught of digital ephemera and interrogates modern life through the vernacular of video games.
- (15)
- Joshua Tilley
- Harmony Korine
Aggro Dr1ft 2023 1h 20m Crime Drama Action List 39% Tomatometer 36 Reviews Filmmaker Harmony Korine uses infrared photography in a dreamlike portrait of a tormented assassin.
- (35)
- Joshua Tilley, Jordi Mollà, Travis Scott
- Harmony Korine
- Crime, Drama, Action
- Harmony Korine’s strange, spellbinding experiment
- What's your favorite Harmony Korine movie?
- The 25 Best Action Movies of All Time
- Verdict
By Siddhant Adlakha
Updated: Sep 2, 2023 10:05 pm
Posted: Sep 2, 2023 9:55 pm
This review is based on a screening at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival.
Aggro Dr1ft is the kind of movie that will, by design, frustrate much of its audience. Its Venice Film Festival screenings have seen constant streams of walkouts during all of its 90 minutes – but if you’re attuned to the peculiar wavelength of the latest film from director Harmony Korine, the result is rewarding and unsettling. Korine has himself cast doubt on whether Aggro Dr1ft even qualifies as a film at all, a fear that appears to stem from the project’s formal audacity: It was shot entirely with a thermal camera (think Predator, if the entire movie was seen from the Predator’s POV), and takes nearly all its aesthetic cues from video games.
It's a hallucinatory death dream at the gates of hell, following a highly skilled assassin named Bo (Jordi Mollà), who speaks in poetic sonnets about his profession, and embarks on a mission to free himself from the nebulous violence consuming his life and keeping him from his family. That description over-simplifies things; it’s like calling Korine’s Spring Breakers a college getaway film. What immediately stands out about Aggro Dr1ft is its unconventional infrared photography, which transforms urban landscapes into psychedelic paintings. The colors morph and flash in different hues, as if the settings on the camera were in constant flux, searching for something within its subjects that it could not find – a soul, perhaps? However, this search has the opposite effect; it renders the human form uncanny and formless. Human beings become instantly dehumanized. Facial features are lost, but details stand out all the more, like crucifix necklaces, or a cold blue machete being grasped by a red or yellow body bleeding out and slowly losing its warmth.
The Beach Bum
Gummo
Julien Donkey-Boy
Spring Breakers
Trash Humpers
Other. Tell us in the comments.
Their movements all appear to be enhanced by higher frame rates. Their gestures are robotic, but exaggerated. Their lines – almost all of which are ADR’d – are tedious, expository, and delivered in stilted fashion. (Mollà often distinguishes his allies from his enemies in cacophonous voiceover that competes with the creeping synths and booming brass of the film’s thundering score.) Even the movie’s primary antagonist, a demonic thug who seems to sprout angel wings at random intervals, speaks in catchphrases, and continually repeats a humping motion, like a taunt; he’s a Grand Theft Auto gang leader spliced with a Final Fantasy boss. These other characters are, in essence, NPCs, or at least that’s how Bo perceives them through his deeply disturbed perspective. He’s someone who views violence and death as a higher calling that he’s both drawn to and must reject. The film is pathologically evangelical in its warped conception of guilt and penance, as if it were taking inspiration from the modern American political landscape, in which armed bloodshed is worshiped as much as it’s abhorred; in which religious extremism contorts the mind. At one point, after establishing his own cult – led by his protégé Zion (Travis Scott) – Bo sermonizes about God’s benevolence and the ecstasy of love as a severed head drips blood onto a staircase. It’s fucking hilarious.
The movie’s primary antagonist is a Grand Theft Auto gang leader spliced with a Final Fantasy boss.
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In this societal context, filtering Aggro Dr1ft through a gaming lens becomes its own form of cultural satire. Video games have long been blamed for mass shootings and other violent outbursts (no such connection has ever been found). But Korine, in essence, completes the feedback loop by conceiving of a video-game-like piece of media – a movie for all intents and purposes – as a living entity, and an evil one, having seemingly absorbed all the malice in modern American society. In its purview, people are just shapes and cultural signifiers: two-dimensional, brainless cows just waiting to be slaughtered. Sometimes you can see what lies beneath their surface – specific mods and “skins,” designed as tattoo-like shorthand – but most of the time, they’re disposable. It’s an individualistic but deeply nihilistic viewpoint expressed in the most existential terms, as Bo waxes poetic about the universe, his family, and his children’s future.
Staring deep into the soul of American culture once again, Harmony Korine delivers the strangest movie of his career with Aggro Dr1ft – though even he may not call it a movie. It’s a trance-like hallucination about demons, assassins and death, shot entirely with thermal cameras, and taking most of its aesthetic cues from Grand Theft Auto. You’ll ei...
- Siddhant Adlakha
Aggro Dr1ft exudes the existential anxiety of a 50-year-old artist who used to be a stoner provocateur now struggling to remain in his groove as he becomes old, uncool and out-of-touch.
Sep 13, 2023 · Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft cedes control of its images to pure vibes. The film was shot entirely in thermal vision, resulting in a hallucinatory aesthetic of neon colors that simultaneously assaults and seduces the senses.
Sep 13, 2023 · Harmony Korine's experimental hit man drama Aggro Dr1ft, starring Jordi Mollà and Travis Scott, is an infared eyesore. Read on for our review.
