rear Aggro Dr1ft Last year, Harmony Korine once again produced one of the most galactically minded films at the Venice Film Festival. Baby invasion. Taking the form of a messy livestream, it’s another video-game-inspired nightmare from the filmmaker, and it’s intense, oppressive and hypnotic, even as it ultimately goes nowhere.
The edgy lords at Korine’s vowel-less production company, EDGLRD, seem less like traditional filmmakers and more like a bunch of media enthusiasts conducting strange experiments, and observe them from afar and you might detect a pretentious pseudo-intellectualism about the future of cinema. Claims Movies are going to be like this in the near future, it’s hard to take this seriously.
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But if you still submit your entry, you’ll come away with a great example of what cinema is like today, along with a strong sense of eerie foreboding about where the world at large is headed — if that’s where it already is.
what Invasion of Babies About?
Invasion of Babies The video starts with a short interview with a fictional Filipino game developer, who for some reason never takes off her VR headset. She explains the concept of the game she created, which unfortunately ended up on the Internet: a first-person shooter (FPS) game in which criminals disguise themselves as babies. Moreover, the game’s popularity on some parts of the web has led people to recreate the core concept of the game in the real world, broadcasting crimes on live streams.
This wickedly funny idea is the very premise of the film: It takes the form of screenlife cinema, shot from the perspective of someone watching and interacting with an online stream, though given that the eponymous baby invaders are fitted with cameras in their helmets, the film itself could as well be a first-person shooter. Hardcore Henry. Using AI facial filters (e.g. TikTok and Snapchat) is a cult-like group that wears black hoodies with horns and goes into hiding under trendy babyface images, collecting ammunition and traveling in a secret van to various Florida mansions.
There’s a Twitch-like scrolling community chat (in a variety of languages, with their own memes and insider lingo) on the left side of the screen, along with graphs and other statistics, but very little of the stream’s actual audio can be heard; instead, the producer’s extremely long, ever-changing rave tracks are layered over the top. burialThere are also whispers about rabbit-like creatures, and as the parameters of the film become clear, so do those of the streamer, who appear to be pulling guns on wealthy hostages for fun and committing brutal murders just off-screen.
“Bright red towels!” multiple viewers wrote in chat, referring to footage of bloodied faces being covered, as if this was a familiar trope or community response. Strange as the assailant’s baby disguise may be, that’s not the most perverse part of the whole affair. It’s the casual cruelty and dehumanization shown in the stream, especially towards women, that becomes part of the film’s self-reflexive take.
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Invasion of Babies It clearly embraces modern forms of violence.
Similarly The influence of video games in Aggro Dr1ftColin seems obsessed with the collision between games and real-world violence. Of course, the idea that video games are the root cause of violent outbursts is It has been exaggerated for a long timeBut the film, like video games themselves, exists in a violent world that adopts the language of mass media; a gentler real-world example would be Video Creator. Impersonation grand theft autoand streamers Pretend Becoming a video game character (Specifically, NPCs or “non-playable characters”) and emojis are accepted as input.
Unfortunately, there is a dark side to adopting this game language. For example, NPCs Become It’s a derogatory term that conveys a lack of personality and humanity, and it’s the next logical step in an online culture that seeks to dehumanize its targets. Invasion of BabiesThe reactions of distressed hostages are quickly screenshotted and turned into memes, trivializing their plight into easily consumable content. The closer they come to being killed, the more filters are applied to their personalities and the more their humanity becomes obscured.
The more the film unfolds from a first-person perspective, the more the viewer feels like a terrorist. Invasion of Babies It is reminiscent of real mass shootings and violent crimes that have been live-streamed. The Christchurch mosque shootings were streamed live on YouTube and Facebook.,and Michigan murder broadcast on Facebook These are just two examples.
If something is missing Invasion of BabiesWhat matters is the actual, horrifying outcome of the crime itself: the victims are living, breathing human beings one moment and gone the next, the actual act of execution hidden. Perhaps this violates the guidelines of the film’s own fictional streaming platform, but this missing piece is also thematically significant. As viewers, should we want to see the whole picture? Without realizing it, the moment we realize there’s more to the story, something we can’t see, we may be complicit in Korine’s depiction of a world gone mad.
Invasion of Babies It’s an engaging experience up to a point.
The film is also self-reflexive about who the audience is, and who the participants in the stream are. Occasionally small windows pop up to show teenagers wearing colorful skull masks watching the stream, as if the film is playing from their perspective (or screen). Not only does the film dictate who the audience is (their eerie desires and how they shape themselves), but in a strange way it also speculates about who the gunman is. The stream starts with the EDGLRD logo; the gunman wears EDGLRD insignia, and the horns they wear are a reference to the EDGLRD logo. Aggro Dr1ftAre they fans who misinterpreted the film as a call to violence, or are they fans who have simply adopted its aesthetic?
Korine seems just as guilty as the rest of the culture. But in a way, this is liberating for Korine as a filmmaker. It gives him the freedom to do essentially anything he wants in the realm of cinematic debauchery. Even if the screen is cluttered with graphics and text, there is a stark realism to the online world we see, and the interactions and behavior of people there. While there is very little bloodshed in the moment, the film has several disturbing flashbacks of what seem to be separate stabbings, shot with a more primitive camera. As if it were a flashback, a memory, or a ghost in the machine.
However, there are also scenes that call into question the reality of the film itself, and the aforementioned stabbing scene is likely a glimpse into the real world from the unreal world. In the prologue, the game designers state their intention to blur the boundaries between the virtual world and the real world, Invasion of Babies In many cases, that is exactly what happens, sending the more willing viewer into a bind, with even the most realistic images becoming merely titillating. But then things take a strange turn, and the photographer Metaverse It’s like we’re getting a peek into the real-life events they’re making happen. Maybe that’s the weird thing about streaming and real-life “games” — we’re witnessing what other viewers will see on their screens, after all — but there are also moments when the digital recreations of real-life environments look so similar to the real thing that it’s really hard to tell the difference.
Understanding (or wanting to understand) that difference is, in a sense, irrelevant. Invasion of Babies The film has no real plot beyond the shooter’s violent descent, and at just 80 minutes, it’s not long enough to get caught up in the techno-madness. But these detours are scary enough in themselves, and leave plenty of room for guesswork. In a film where numbness is at the root of everything, there’s something about it. feel Reality (or not) becomes the most pressing issue: if fiction can feel real, then reality becomes fiction, replacing everything from conspiracy theories to bullets and blood.
Invasion of Babies The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and received high praise from critics.
