Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion Made Me Sick

I thought the first 20 minutes of Baby Invasion were brilliant, and then it kept going for 60 more and by the time I staggered out after the credits, I needed to prop myself up against a wall for a while with my eyes closed. I haven’t had issues with motion sickness from things shot in the first person before, whether it’s the wobbly handheld camerawork of The Blair Witch Project or the camera-is-you stunt that is Hardcore Henry. But Harmony Korine’s latest marries a first-person perspective to a barrage of other visual noise on screen, including icons, pop-ups, picture-in-picture, and a chat overlay, all accompanied by a throbbing non-stop score by British producer Burial. There’s no audible dialogue, though folded into the music is a dreamlike story about a rabbit delivered one slow-drip line at a time by a female vocalist. Baby Invasion in a theater is akin to watching someone play a video game in the middle of a rave being thrown on a truck driven at high speed down winding streets. If anything, it’d be weird not to end up nauseated.

But how many people are ever going to see Baby Invasion in a theater? Like Korine’s previous feature, 2023’s infrared assassin doodle Aggro Dr1ft (which, for temporal comparison, my colleague Bilge Ebiri enjoyed “about five minutes” of), Baby Invasion premiered at the Venice Film Festival, a glittering pantheon to an idea of cinema that Korine purports to be over and done with. The film’s presence here could be chalked up to the global publicity the festival provides, or some lingering nostalgia on Korine’s part, or one of the languid displays of provocation that has defined Edglrd, his new studio/creative collection, since its launch last year. (For instance: instead of standard press notes, Edglrd sent out a single-page manifesto in the voice of Baby Invasion’s live-streaming gang, Duck Mobb.) But I don’t believe for a second that its core audience is expected to watch the film in a single sitting on a big screen. It’s made to play in the backdrop of a party (no playlists necessary!) or on one of many windows open on a desktop. It’s sensorily overwhelming but, if you’re actually trying to give it your full attention, also anesthetizingly boring.

The premise of Baby Invasion is itself a screen-within-a-screen-within-a-screen set-up. In the “Origon Story,” a woman in a headset gives an interview about how the first-person shooter she was working on, which involved robbers with baby faces going into homes, was stolen by Romanian hackers and disseminated on the dark web, where it inspired people to emulate it in real life. From there, we cut to the computer screen of a mask-wearing kid who starts playing the game with some friends. Then we go to the game itself, with a protagonist, Yellow, and fellow color-pseudonymed buddies all in hoodies with AI filters that replace their faces with those of cooing infants when it’s not glitching out and pixelating them entirely. This layer of Baby Invasion, which makes up the bulk of the film, is shot from Yellow’s perspective; his hands and arms are all we see as he chooses which gun he’s going to take with him or knocks back some pills. While shot in the real world, these sequences are overlaid with collectible coin icons, mission directives, save points, and ongoing feedback from a column of commenters on what’s apparently a live stream. As Yellow and his cohort get in a van and drive to a Florida McMansion whose residents they murder in order to rob the place and enjoy its amenities, it becomes unclear which parts of what we’re watching are meant to be real, and which are taking place in a computer.

Korine’s Edglrd films may be meant to represent a break from norms, some “post-cinema” frontier, but there’s still a lot of connective tissue to his earlier filmography, from the clans of disreputable outsiders to the recreational criminality to Florida as a borderland filled with grime, sun-soaked beauty, and vast disparities of wealth. The universe he creates in Baby Invasion is actually plenty beguiling, particularly in the beginning, marrying an Extremely Online nihilism to an apocalyptic aesthetic in which hallucinatory monsters lurk in the shadows and skies over waterfront properties. The vibes are more romantic disaffection than coherent class rage. But vibes are really all the film wants to offer, as evidenced by how it spins its wheels until it makes it to feature length. Vibes and merch — you might notice that the horns the Duck Mobb wears are also a feature of the limited edition $1500 demon masks currently sold out on the Edglrd site. If film is dead and brand building is the future, the way Korine seems to be betting, we should be getting a lot more of this work — hopefully it won’t feel so beholden to the traditional formats their creator still seems confined by, despite his protests. Regardless, you may want to bring a barf bag.