Aggro Dr1fts Orgastic Thermal-Neon Nightmare is an assault on modern Hollywood sensibilities

Harmony Korine is one of the few truly transgressive filmmakers working today, which makes him very valuable in the American landscape. Eschewing any semblance of traditional narrative form or structure, his films feel more like a series of vignettes in the lives of his characters, who are themselves outsiders. He is a poetic mystic of misfits, monsters and outcasts. Its narrow focus on the lives of people many of us wouldn't want to spend time with repels many moviegoers. She's not just making films about these people, she's making us share an emotional space with them, which can be uncomfortable. But we have the impression that Korine is not interested in our comfort. AGRO DR1FT continues this legacy, for better or for worse.

I struggle to find suitable cinematic points of comparison for the Korines films. The closest analogues of his work, as I understand it, are literary. I see more of Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor than any other filmmaker, with his Southern Gothic style focusing on the societal and structural decline of the rural American South teeming with outcasts, lonely, monsters and burnout. Yet one can imagine even OConnors Misfit cringing in the face of many of Korines' characters.

With AGRO DR1FT, even these comparisons fail. I can't think of anything else I've ever seen that exists on the same level as this film. While his previous two films seemed much more polished and polished than his output had previously been, AGRO DR1FT should put aside any anxiety that he was sliding further into bed. Created by new design collective Harmony Korines EDGLRD (pronounced Edge Lord), it was written and directed by Harmony Korine and stars Jordi Moll as Bo and Travis Scott as Zion.

The plot of this film is so simple that it hardly goes beyond the premise: Bo (Moll), the world's greatest assassin (we have to take his word for it because his murders are usually simple affairs, involving him directs towards its target and kills). them), is given the task of killing a terribly evil crime lord. Bo is reluctant to continue his job because he just wants to spend his time with his beloved family, who seem to exist only in relation to him. The rest of the film is about him fighting his way toward this goal while feeling depressed.

While this premise sounds like the kind of simplicity that drives a film to explosive, non-stop action, that's not the case with AGRO DR1FT. Most of this film is surprisingly slow, involving long close-ups of scary faces, panning shots of men holding guns and driving cars, all in brightly neon-lit dreamscapes. The score, an electric, punchy number, vibrates in the background, while quiet, whispered voiceovers narrate, often incomprehensibly. In this respect, it is closer to Eraser than any of Korine's more recent films, but instead of poetic or humorous ruminations on the characters' lives, we mostly hear menacing, violent comments and brief monologues about a loving family. The voiceovers add a sense of meaning without adding anything meaningful. I suspect many will be bored.

People naturally focused on the fact that AGRO DR1FT was filmed using special NASA thermal cameras, but to focus exclusively on that is to oversimplify the look of this film. It's a world where devils surge into the sky and lightning inexplicably shoots out of neon clouds. Often, other worlds pass through people's bodies, revealing a physical interiority that suggests machines, dancing geometric shapes, and vague human skulls that shimmer through skin.

If my dreams had dreams, this is what they might look like. Capturing the appearance of a dream is often a mindless task in films because, ultimately, cameras show us an essentially frozen concrete world, while dreams are constantly changing before our eyes in ways we never expect. not in question while dreaming. The shift in reality never feels unnatural in a dream and this film captures that sensation in an unsettling and often beautiful way. I watched this film as if in a trance, speechless. Now that I've had a chance to think about it, my feelings are more complex.

Two things are true at once: This is one of the most stunningly beautiful films I've seen in a long time, and it is aggressively stupid. If this film gives the impression of an intense dream, it also carries the curse of dreams: the spell it casts ends as soon as the dreamer wakes up. When the lights came back on after the movie, I had a hard time remembering what I found so intriguing. A lot of this is a cool idea from 14 year old boys. The men are tense and always ready to fight and kill, and the women are either strippers or they are at home, languishing on their beds waiting for their beloved husbands to return, not knowing what do for themselves when they are alone.

Korines films are always singular, with very few stylistic similarities between them. Each new film is a new world in itself aesthetically, even if there are often thematic threads.ideas which serve as connective tissue between them even as they actively resist conveying real-world themes. At their best, Korines' films do not comment on the people they depict, but they do expand the audience's capacity for empathy toward people who live beyond the borders of our society. They don't moralize, they don't comment, they just say that these people exist. What to do with this information is up to the viewer.

AGRO DR1FT is even more intensely anti-theme than Korine's previous releases. What's the point of all this sound and fury? Apparently nothing. I loved this movie for its 80 minutes because it took me somewhere new, showing me new things and giving me new experiences along the way, and in today's cinematic landscape, that was quite engaging for me. But reflecting on that experience reveals that it was hollow.

At the end of the day, you probably already know if you're interested in this movie. The raw force of its originality was enough to keep me engaged, but it was just empty calories. If you desperately need a movie that shows you something you've never seen before, a movie that will take you to places you've never been, then this is worth the price of a ticket . If you want that originality to serve something meaningful, something that will expand you, then you may want to succeed. I'm glad I had the chance to see it in the theater and I'm glad it exists, even if it's not a trip I'm looking forward to making again.