The ‘bad-boy’ director’s latest film is a torrent of non-stop violence that fails to add up to an aesthetic vision greater than the sum of its parts
I saw Baby Invasion (2024) on a Friday night at a good-size music venue in New York. The event was advertised as a ‘first-of-its-kind’ screening event, a ‘live remix’ in which Korine would ‘apply DJ techniques to feature film’. People came expecting a party. But once inside the venue, the seating arrangement seemed more suitable to a chamber orchestra. The 90 minutes that followed were, perplexingly, similarly soporific. Set in an animated landscape-composite of what looks like Florida – also the setting of Korine’s last two films – Baby Invasion documents, through a first-person-shooter-POV, the quest of a group of criminals with the faces of, yes, babies, as they commit an armed home robbery at a blonde family’s mansion. These baby invaders say things (via text dialogue box) like “Hand over the rings or lose your fingers!” There’s spinning gold coins and prompts to “Purchase Pills? YES/NO”, to which our baby invader always selects, YES. The pills (prescription, dual-tone capsules) seem to offer a powerup, but the precise effect on the gameplay is difficult to ascertain, since we are not, after all, playing the game. In the end we, or rather the baby invaders, win. We/they have laid waste to the family’s mansion, eaten the watermelon from their fruit bowls, stolen the money from their safe and killed some of them, I guess. Despite all the action, it was difficult after the film ended to remember a single detail.
The subtly calibrated interplay of boredom and shock, immediacy and irony, that make Gummo (1997) or Spring Breakers (2012) such masterpieces of cinema and American visual culture are rendered impossible by the pace and POV of Baby Invasion. But that’s the point: the second feature from his new production company EDGLRD, Baby Invasion was born of Korine’s frustration with narrative cinema. His feeling that movies are out of touch with the way people consume media today is one shared by many – but put into artistic practice by disappointingly few. The aesthetic mission of EDGLRD is premised on the idea that our everyday reality has become increasingly gamified, a thesis that is helpfully spelled out for us early on in Baby Invasion: ‘THIS IS NOT A MOVIE. THIS IS A GAME. THIS IS NOT A GAME. THIS IS REAL LIFE. THIS IS NOT REAL LIFE. THERE IS NO REAL LIFE. THERE IS JUST NOW. THE ENDLESS NOW.’ This series of mindfucking statements, rendered in a pixelated font over a screensaver of turquoise waves, is punctuated by a pair of black-gloved hands that appear periodically to jiggle its raised middle fingers at us, the viewer-gamer. We’re never allowed to forget that Korine is first and foremost a bad boy. But is Baby Invasion bad or just…bad?
Well, there’s certainly a lot of guns. And blood. And pop-ups. There’s random words in Chinese, plus some purely calligraphic ‘computer code’. There’s a nonstop feed of – clearly AI-generated, inane – ‘comments’ that scroll infinitely up the right-hand side of the screen in a fake chat-window. There’s techno, from legendary electronic musician Burial – but it sounds more like something you’d find by searching ‘type beat’ on YouTube. Sometimes, a bunny rabbit hops inexplicably across our field of vision. No individual element felt particularly considered. Instead, Korine’s aesthetic wager seems to be that an undifferentiated torrent of non-stop violence, movement and peripheral stimulation will add up to an aesthetic vision greater than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, the ‘NOW’ Korine makes us sit through felt, by the end of the screening, indeed ‘ENDLESS.’
In the end, the ‘live remixing’ advertised on the flyer seemed to amount to the inclusion of the occasional live shot of the audience, looking mildly bored in our seats – presumably taken by the guys in ski masks prowling the perimeter of the audience. These cameramen-criminals seemed to have been instructed to point their cameras at us like guns. Upon making eye contact with one of them, I felt embarrassed for both of us.
Baby Invasion screened at Knockdown Center, New York, on 21 March
