Aggro, Certainly Aggro
After half a year of film festival promotion Aggro Dr1ft is finally in (albeit very limited) theatrical distribution. Shot entirely in infrared, starring Spanish actor Jordi Mollà and co-starring a second-billed Travis Scott, accompanied as per usual with a series of baffling interviews with its enigmatic director, Aggro Dr1ft has been greeted with excitement and confusion in equal measure. All of that is to say that I really take no joy at all in relaying that Aggro Dr1ft is almost objectively boring. And not Bela Tarr boring, like trying to wake up from a lucid dream boring, with big bright red and blue splotches representing pointed guns and shaking asses stretching on towards infinity. Each individual scene feels like its own eternity.
And yet I’d have to consider anyone who wrote off the film just based on that kind of a fool. Tedious although it may be at times, there’s a method to Korine’s madness. In a mode not too dissimilar from what Gus Van Zant did with Gerry two decades prior, Korine here is using the medium of cinema to extricate what makes video games tick. Korine’s scenes feel more like game levels, full of repetitive movements and spoken phrases. It isn’t an oddity when the merchant in Resident Evil 4 says “what are ya buying” every time he opens his coat, why is it so strange when Toto says “I will kill you” for the hundredth time? Characters’ repetitive actions resemble looping and reused animations, the bizarre line reads and pontificating dialogue recalling the weaker moments of the Grand Theft Auto series, Toto’s caged strippers a rated-R take on the same damsel-in-distress trope that had Mario fighting Bowser to free Princess Peach, primitive AI imagery covers characters’ bodies in shifting cables and cybernetics, associating these bodies with machines, and hinting to the audience that this story might not have much to it; it’s as surreal and empty as an AI drawing.
This is not exactly a great feat of observation on my part. Aggro Dr1ft’s initial release was accompanied with the announcement of Korine’s new production company EDGLRD, a company with apparent aspirations of video game development. Mollà’s character directly refers to the plot as a “game”, Swedish rapper Bladee’s recent music video directed by Korine has a video game theme, and then there’s Korine outright saying as much in interviews.
What’s interesting is how many of Korine’s video-gamey artistic details can also be seen as throwbacks to his previous work. The assassin plotline, strippers in ski masks, and tropical locale are reminiscent of Spring Breakers, the pelvic thrusts and palilalia of arch-villain Toto recall Trash Humpers, a film which uses a similarly abrasive visual gimmick to deliver an experience that’s more aesthetic than narrative. Where Trash Humpers leans on the analogue grit of VHS to create a Brechtian distance with the audience, Aggro Dr1ft achieves the same through the eye-squinting effort it forces upon the viewer to discern characters and objects in its dead-pixel-riddled field of view.
Now where does all that put Aggro Dr1ft in Korine’s greater filmography? It’s certainly a return to the type of aesthetic extremism Korine practiced in Trash Humpers and Julien Donkey-Boy, and as a new phase in his vision, it certainly seems to be something of a breakthrough. It was a chore to sit through that I almost immediately wanted to watch again, and at a lean 80 minutes it may very well have high rewatchability. Or maybe not. Really, I hardly know what to make of it.