Harmony Korine’s Unforgettable ‘Aggro Dr1ft’ Is ‘Grand Theft Auto’ on Acid
Like nothing you’ve ever seen, Aggro Dr1ft strives to create not simply something new, but The New, delivering a barrage of sound and image that amalgamates the old and familiar into a fresh, hallucinatory cinematic vision. It’s brilliant. It’s tacky. It’s exhilarating. It’s wearisome. There’s no middle ground with this boundary-pushing whatsit, which will earn reactions as diverse and heated as the various elements that comprise its wholly unique 80 minutes. Destined to be passionately adored and despised, it’s a provocation, a stunt, a dare, and an experiment—as well as a bold one-of-a-kind experience that, following its polarizing debut at numerous 2023 festivals, shouldn’t be missed when it arrives in domestic theaters beginning May 10.
Aggro Dr1ft is the beastly offspring of many mothers and fathers, playing like the bastard progeny of Grand Theft Auto, Scarface, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and kindred action and crime sagas, all of it fashioned with terrifying and trashy gangland and strip-club aesthetics. Korine shoots his film in eye-searing infrared (via thermal NASA cameras) that makes everything pulsate in blazing reds, yellows, purples, pinks, and blacks, such that it approximates what it might be like to see the world after staring for too long at a solar eclipse.
Gliding along and rotating about as if in a dream, the director’s cinematography is at once entrancing and off-putting, and that conflict is further exacerbated by visuals that throb with unholy X-ray malevolence. Faces and bodies flash bio-mechanical veins and tendrils that resemble modernized versions of H.R. Giger’s iconic designs, suggesting a marriage of man and machine, not to mention the mortal and the holy—all of which is embodied by the story’s protagonist.
Bo (Jordi Mollà) is “the world’s greatest assassin,” and as he dispatches a target in a pool at film’s outset, an enormous demon—its skull face adorned with colossal horns—materializes behind him, at once fueling his ferocity and mimicking his physical movements. Wearing a mask that often exhibits a skeletal visage, Bo is a death dealer who ruminates in melancholic voiceover about his place in this fundamentally chaotic and debased reality.
Travis Scott
“The old world is no more,” he muses after completing his mission. Upon visiting his wife and children, whom he loves with a passion that matches his fondness for ending lives, he announces, “The next generation will reign supreme.” Such comments speak to Korine’s belief in Aggro Dr1ft’s claim to cinema’s future, and there’s something thrilling about the lengths to which the director pushes things into extremity. An abstract venture that’s nihilistic to its core, it feels at once groundbreaking and reductive, mature and childish, and those contradictions are the fuel that propel it into ever bleaker and more bonkers territory.
There’s a story lurking inside Aggro Dr1ft, but it matters less than the poses struck, the vibe conjured, and the attitude expressed. Bo works for a rich man who lives in one of the countless mansions spied in this Floridian hellscape of scorching colors and screeching bird noises, the latter punctuating an AraabMuzik score that’s as avant-garde as Korine’s imagery. Scuzzy, pounding, and dialed to 11 so that half the dialogue (much of it narrated) is difficult to discern, the film’s soundscape is part and parcel of this proto-kitschy marvel. So too is the barely existent narrative, which concerns Bo being hired to take out a growling overlord named Toto (Joshua Tilley) who walks around in shorts and boots, boasts a featureless face and giant wings, carries an enormous sword, and is surrounded by scantily clad women whom he habitually refers to as “bitches,” including when he locks them in hanging cages.
A demon in a skull mask
“Dropping souls, dropping bodies, dropping souls,” intones Bo, who believes that “there is a magic in the brutality” and declares that “I am a hero. I am a solitary hero.” What’s said is spacy and hackneyed, and articulated with a wooden sincerity that seems modeled after the way characters talk in video game cutscenes. Korine distills everything to a self-conscious cliché, be it Bo’s contemplations, his adversaries’ threats, or the many sights of dangling crucifixes, bouncing female behinds, and guns that create lens flares when aimed at the screen.
A Corvette drives down a South Beach boulevard, one tire so yellow it appears to be on fire. A cadre of blade-wielding hooded minions surround Toto (“We are the children with devil faces”), and it’s not clear—nor does it really matter—if they’re dwarves or children. Two strippers perform on stage, their crotches emitting sparks like it was the Fourth of July. On and on the nuttiness comes, and as with repeated lines of dialogue, the monotony turns the proceedings into a nightmare acid trip of murder, longing, and badass affectation.
‘Dark Matter’ Is Your Next Head-Spinning Binge Obsession
Aggro Dr1ft resembles the sort of hypnotic movie that would play at a house party thrown by James Franco’s Alien from Spring Breakers, and its demented dynamism mesmerizes far more than it grates. Eschewing convention with every crashing, clashing note, it’s a work which demands that viewers succumb to its wild instincts and attune themselves to its phantasmagoric wavelength.
He Stole Millions by Impersonating Hollywood’s Biggest Execs
The film’s pointlessness is its point, as Korine dives headfirst off the deep end into a stew of agony and ecstasy. On a luxury yacht filled with armed henchmen and hot tub-crowding strippers, Bo tells a beloved comrade named Zion (Travis Scott) that he should read Julius Caesar, after which he asks Zion to look after his son and daughter should he perish on one of his assignments. Greed, power, tragedy, and damnation are omnipresent. So too is bracing madness, which crescendos once Bo finishes what he’s set out to do, and leaves his gruesome handiwork for the robed devils and S&M-outfitted women who populate this unreal land.
“An assassin’s work is never finished… until the world is clean. And then we sleep the eternal sleep,” says Bo at the end of Aggro Dr1ft. Yet such pessimism is offset by his hopeful belief that “God is love. Forever.” Make of it what you will, but the light and the dark of Korine’s latest burn equally, unforgettably bright.
Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.
Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.
