Baby Invasion Review: Harmony Korine Establishes a New, Anxiety-Inducing Benchmark for Cinematic Absurdity

      Note: This review was initially published as part of our 2024 Venice coverage. Baby Invasion is now accessible on VOD and screening at select events from EDGLRD.

      At last year’s Venice Film Festival, Harmony Korine made an audacious pivot with Aggro Dr1ft, the inaugural feature from his new production company, EDGLRD. This enigmatic film, shot in infrared and deliberately lacking a clear cinematic style, left audiences more perplexed than when they entered (if they stayed until the end).

      It received an abundance of boos and saw numerous walkouts, yet inexplicably garnered a passionate, near-cult following almost instantly. Clearly, the EDGLRD table has been set, and people are just as keen to critique the new offering as they are to consume it. Thus, it's particularly timely that Korine has returned a year later with his second feature: Baby Invasion. Where should we start?

      An appropriate approach to reviewing Baby Invasion might simply be to state, “you just have to see it.” Regardless of how detailed one becomes, the uniquely overwhelming experience will remain elusive to description, scarcely conveyable through words or even film. It presents as a genre-defying (with avant-garde or horror being the closest classifications) barrage of violence, creativity, and livestream gaming elements that shift rapidly––accompanied by relentless techno beats from Burial––without any clear reasoning.

      There exists a user-logic, yet you aren’t the user. It’s more akin to observing someone play a video game. The game in focus? “Baby Invaders,” a first-person shooter where the player must execute mansion break-ins alongside mercenary pals (affectionately dubbed “Duck Mobb”) while exploring various mind-bending “rabbit holes” before time runs out. The co-invaders sport black hoodies, AI-generated baby faces, and EDGLRD-branded horn helmets, making them genuinely creepy.

      The camera is manipulated by the user––rapidly scanning, veering off-course, lingering too long in certain spots, and erratically oscillating––typically utilizing a superwide lens. (It takes 20 minutes of this exploratory toggling before the actual heist commences.) The wandering pace, long takes, user-driven movements, and distorting lens bring to mind Victoria Pereda’s bold camerawork in Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge 3, the closest reference Baby Invasion has outside of Twitch influences.

      Let’s diverge again. A left turn thrice over. Into a pause menu. Into an endless mini-game featuring shootable pink figures. Into a hostage-like video from the game’s developer in Mexico, who speaks anxiously about Romanian hackers and hyper-realistic games that ensnare players in a waking daze, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. One element appears while another fades away. Here are five new additions. Remove two. Here are seven. What are these elements, you wonder? They can vary widely, but here are a few examples that barely scratch the surface:

      Livestream comments cascade down the left side of the screen for most of the film’s duration. Explorable rooms are cluttered with collectible, floating gold coins and luminous save points. A somber female narrator delivers abstract existential and philosophical one-liners every 5-30 seconds throughout the runtime. She continuously discusses the rabbit and its journey. A prompt box inquires if we wish to buy pills. Tiny, Tamagotchi-like Duck Mobb babies scurry across the bottom of the frame, with cryptic script inexplicably bubbling above them.

      A dialogue box frequently reappears, summarizing hints and goals from other Duck Mobb members. There’s a primary user wearing a rasta-colored EDGLRD mask, who we frequently return to, his webcam feed typically occupying the top-right corner of the screen, following livestreaming conventions. At one point, we observe him playing a mini-game through a prismatic cube-tube portal surrounded by infinite looping screens, aimlessly moving back and forth through the disorienting space. The user decides to use the bathroom in the invaded mansion for a couple of minutes and revels in it.

      The score is bold, relentless, and constantly evolving, adding layers of tension to every moment of the experience. An AI-generated image of a rabbit traversing a field during a thunderstorm abruptly dissolves onscreen, disappearing within seconds. Colorful glitching lines appear on the bodies of bound hostages as they struggle on the floor, their faces obscured by digital dots. We retreat through the wall, glimpse the game’s blueprint graphics for a brief moment, and witness reality transform into digital DNA. A charcoal-steel, baby-faced being residing in the ocean (refer to the poster) makes a profoundly impactful appearance. The catalog of mind-bending oddities continues.

      Baby Invasion is a quintessential form of Art, establishing a new benchmark for cinematic absurdism, where every audio-visual component