AGGRO DR1FT: Mesmerizing and Unwatchable

“I am the world’s greatest assassin” said in a sincere, hushed whisper by a man torn between his cartoonishly adoring family and his violent, seedy underworld business really only makes sense as an earnest line of dialogue when it’s been written by a person who also named his production company EDGLRD and has become so bored by the idea of traditional filmmaking that his formal mode of operation is now that of experimental provocateur. That’s the wavelength that Harmony Korine’s AGGRO DR1FT is primarily operating on, empty provocation that rests almost entirely on vibes and acid-drenched psychedelic atmosphere. Repulsive, juvenile, and obnoxiously over the top edgy, Korine’s exploration of ego about a cool family man whose dedication to craft is so great that he has no choice but to go out and train the next generation of auteur assassins so he can return to his wife and children cooler than ever is as insufferable as it is frequently unwatchable.

Shot entirely in hypercolor IR, there isn’t a single point throughout where the film isn’t actively searing your retinas – but Korine’s dedication to psychedelia doesn’t stop there, frequently inserting nauseating Google DeepDream imagery (a use of neural network image processing so counterintuitive to anything you would ever want to put in a film that it’s hard to call out as any kind of unethical use of AI) in the middle of his shots until you start feeling high no matter how sober you are. All of this is true, and yet AGGRO DR1FT is still an undeniably entrancing piece of experimental cinema. Korine might have shifted largely into a mode of trolling his audience for his own amusement, but he’s not a canonized independent auteur for nothing.

This seems to be the exact kind of contradiction that Korine is riding the high of here, the fact that everything is so overtly stupid on the surface while crafting imagery that’s genuinely novel and occasionally beautiful. When he’s deploying new techniques and swapping color palettes with frenzied abandon like Obayashi’s evil sun-drenched Miami cousin, it’s hard not to respect the way he’s crafted an entirely new universe through his thermographic lens. After essentially inventing what is now a homogenous and tired aesthetic with Spring Breakers, it makes sense that his next reinvention of form would have to be so unwatchable that nobody would dare try and recreate it. At the same time, his previous Miami set films - Spring Breakers and poetic stoner odyssey The Beach Bum - were not just reinventions of visual aesthetic but genuinely subversive masterworks, interrogating America’s collapsing social and economic ecosystem by way of both broke college girls buying into a violent hedonistic dream and an ultra-rich white guy whose own hedonistic fantasy proves him nothing but a parasitic leech draining and destroying everyone around him.

It’s a shame AGGRO DR1FT is so much more interested in trolling its audience with its juvenile narrative choices and empty objectification than it is in finding interesting ways to subvert expectations, but it’s also no surprise that there are as many people who already find this to be a new masterpiece in Korine’s oeuvre as there are people who think it’s repulsive, hollow garbage; and I suspect Korine is perfectly happy living in that twilight space. After all, are you really pushing the boundaries of cinema if you’re making something unanimously crowd-pleasing?