Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, and we’re re-publishing it with the film’s wider release. Check out our extensive review slate of TIFF 2023, revisit our official preview and complete archives of prior editions.
Like many of the true iconoclasts he takes after, Harmony Korine is less a filmmaker than a generational cinematic bellwether. In each cycle, Korine’s aggressively surreal yet gritty style courts edgelord teens, college students, the occasional iconic German filmmaker, and whatever editorial conglomerate is running Vice’s print edition, and, intoxicated with love and, importantly, self-recognition, they believe that he is their filmmaker. Nowhere is this clearer than the Gen X experience of his first four films: Korine’s transition from trailer park art-world wonderchild, whose early work like Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy got him that initial acclaim (“Hey, turns out that kid who wrote Kids can fucking direct, huh?”) to a different kind of arthouse filmmaker, who made audacious fables about islands of impersonators and flying nuns (Mr. Lonely) and old folks just going fucking wack on shit (Trash Humpers). Mr. Lonely was greeted with an indifferent shrug, but Trash Humpers attracted a kind of universal disgust, as I’m genuinely sure that AGGRO DR1FT (from here on referred to as Aggro Drift, because fuck you, I’m not typing that out every time) will from the set that internalized Spring Breakers as a millennial manifesto.
In practice, Aggro Drift is perhaps best described as a Hideo Kojima-directed cutscene from one of the Metal Gear Solid games, with the political diatribes traded for a dynamic aesthetic that is unlike anything you’ve paid to see in a cinema. It’s filmed in a hybrid night-vision/heat-vision, which renders the screen abrasively colorful: When I say that this movie is fucking gorgeous, I mean it. I mean it when our main character, supposedly the “World’s Best Assassin” and loving family man (which is probably on a mug his kids gave him), garrotes his first victim in a pool of lava-colored water, with a giant devil mimicking his motions. I mean it when he goes to collect his money from a cyberpunk trap house, where the hustlers and dealers grow AI-hallucinated Giger armor. I mean it when strippers clap cheeks on a speedboat in front of the man’s protégé, played by Travis Scott. Go ahead and get your giggles out now, folks.
Seriously, had Korine chopped these 80 minutes up, put them on televisions ranging from cathode ray to OLED, and stacked and scattered them about a loft in one of the world’s proper capital A-R-T art capitals of the world, he probably would have ducked the nerds who value plot and story above, you know, magic. It always amazes me how varying a TIFF audience’s patience can be: One motherfucker chopping wood for 10 minutes in a static shot won’t have would-be Homer Simpsons shouting at the screen, but vivid color over what is probably the most Korine film that Korine has made since Trash Humpers lets the goddamn dogs out.
There’s a strange assumption of seriousness underwriting all of these laughs and incredulous “whats,” which I think is a bizarre thing to assume about any Korine movie, with the exception of The Beach Bum. One can note the irony in his most traditional and mainstream comedy, also being his most sincere film produced to date, but seeing a Korine for a three-act structure or anything approaching a serious interrogation of something other than a given aesthetic style is like reading Playboy for the advertisements. If Spring Breakers glamorized and tore to shreds the iconography associated with early ‘10s EDM and Miami hood culture, Aggro Drift does the same for its hypehouse hyperpoppers, whose glorious blighted anhedonia receives royal treatment even as it feels like someone sucking on a duster can under a ski mask.
Its hellish Miami – the negative image of the splendor one found in The Beach Bum – is the kind of setting in which a budget Seijun Suzuki cyberpunk picture could plant roots, and I’d suggest that’s the closest thing to what Korine’s found here, synthesizing the aesthetic of horrorcore and emo rap with anime and the modern giallo knockoffs (I’m aware that my age is showing, and my AARP card is coming in the mail soon enough), much as Suzuki blended westerns and new wave filmmaking. Honestly, I think Aggro Drift might be best experienced alone – which is not to say that one should wait for home video or whatever (where else are you going to go near-deaf from a thundering and great Araabmuzik score?), though you better have someone with you if you decide to take something you probably shouldn’t, because you’ll lose your goddamned mind – just so that one can fully lose themselves in the image.
Yes, Harmony has made Trash Humpers for the Spring Breakers generation, a movie that is so painfully prescient that it feels old and worthy of a mocking shrug. It is inherently alienating and dismissive towards the people who thought he was making his way towards some amount of respectability, that he’d “grown up” or whatever and decided to finally make movies for adults or at least films that resemble other films. This is a mid-life crisis movie (or, hell, for the Letterboxd generation, a quarter-life crisis movie), but not in the way that you’d expect, because he’s not depicting his own: Rather, he’s helping his audience have theirs. That was the great thing about Trash Humpers: After months of ragging and 0% Rotten Tomatoes scores or whatever, they’d go on to some impossibly-cool-seeming film blog and discover that some globetrotting kid critic that was coming up in the world had slotted it in highly on their end of the year list, only eclipsed by a few of the true greats and eclipsing a good many others. Imagine, if you will, shutting your laptop screen, scoffing. Then, the doubt sets in. Did they see something that I didn’t? Do I just not get these things anymore? Am I… old? And as you age further and further into a solidified future, Korine somehow manages to stay as young as he ever was, seeing the present clearer than you ever saw his past.