Venice 2023: Aggro Dr1ft
VENICE There are few filmmakers that actually try to push forward the cinematic medium. For better or worse, enfant terrible and provocateur Harmony Korine has decided to build a new production company and design studio called Edglrd, implementing new animation techniques and artificial intelligence to create not only films, but also video games and other art forms.
Screening as part of the 2023 Venice Film Festival, his latest film, Aggro Dr1ft, is meant to showcase the potential of emerging technologies and the studio's artistic vision. More feature-length music video and mood piece than conventional feature, the use of infrared cameras to tell a predictable gangster story is an interesting gimmick that is sadly never used to its fullest potential.
Since Korine loves drawing comparisons to video games when discussing Aggro Dr1ft, the best way to describe the film is a "tech demo": it is an excuse to put on display what the future of cinema could look like. If this is what the medium could become in 5 or 10 years, then it needs to be euthanized: dated and disgusting gender politics aside, every single female character in the film is nothing more than a scantily-clad sex worker, the worst offender is the use of AI images superimposed over the infrared footage.
The visuals themselves are admittedly impressive, transforming Florida into a nauseating and grotesque fantasy version of countless crime thrillers that have graced the silver screen in the past decades. However, Korine destroys many of the colorful shots with cheap and distracting AI images, working as tattoos or weird symbols that appear on various surfaces. While the intent may be to make this feel like a drug trip, it falls completely on its face, taking away from the immersive soundscape of the piece and reminding viewers of the ethically dubious and horrible-looking use of AI over anything artistic.
Artificially generated images aside, Aggro Dr1ft is nowhere near as fun or vibrant as the director's more famous Spring Breakers. The possibilities to stage memorable sequences with infrared cameras, be it a shootout in which bodies grow cold, sudden bursts of heat, or even moments of sensuality, are limitless. Sadly, the film amounts to nothing more than long, stretched-out shots of the protagonist who, through monotonous voice-over, keeps narrating that he is both a father and a hit man, a terrible person but also a husband. Korine may think that he is the new Godard, beaconing a new era for the cinematic medium, but Aggro Dr1ft is not as revolutionary and groundbreaking as he thinks or hopes, and the non-existent narrative feels like a failed attempt to replicate what Nicolas Winding Refn did over the past decade: take well-known tropes and cliches and making them his own.