Call it the Assassin’s Creed if you like, but there are three stories about contract killers at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Ahead of David Fincher’s The Killer and Richard Linklater’s action-comedy Hit Man was Harmony Korine’s out-of-competition entry Aggro Dr1ft – a film that’s as annoying as the figure “1" that’s inexplicably lodged in the title.
It’s almost three decades since Korine burst on the scene, scripting Larry Clark’s game-changing tale of delinquents, Kids. Since then he has directed experimental, out-on-a-limb indies like Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy and Trash Humpers.
Aggro Dr1ft feels like the B-side to his popular 2012 movie Spring Breakers, which starred James Franco alongside Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine.
Entirely filmed in infrared, it’s an 80-minute endurance test for the eyes – a movie that’s liable to cause seizures for the more sensitive. Spanish actor and artist Jordi Molla plays Bo, a hitman who is “a killer and a husband”. He has a young boy and a wife at home, but he also has blood on his hands. “I was born to kill,” he intones. “It is all I know. I am the world’s greatest assassin.”
With his glasses, goatee and lank hair, he doesn’t exactly look like a crack killer, though it is hard to tell amid the lurid rainbow of reds, greens and yellows that constitute this thermal vision. Much of the time, anyway, he’s wearing a balaclava, disguising his features. Now he faces his biggest foe, as he takes on a job “worth more money than you could ever spend in your whole life," as his client tells him.
This demonic entity, with wings, looks like a creature straight out of Dante’s Inferno.
Shot in the boxlike Academy ratio, the decision to film entirely in infrared is a daring one, typical of Korine. Frequently, animated hallucinations – skulls and flowers, it seems, though it is hard to tell – are imprinted on characters’ bodies, swirling and moving before your eyes. It’s a clever touch, suggesting that Bo exists in a world stranded between this one and the next. But for all its visual innovation, the story is largely unwatchable.
Something of a video game aesthetic is conjured by Korine here. Set in the Miami criminal underbelly, it’ll remind you of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – not least because the odd-looking knife fights and other clashes feel like a poorly rendered game from the early 2000s. At least the propulsive electro score by AraabMuzik pulls you through this bizarre psychedelic world of night clubs, freeways and waterfronts.
Korine calls it “an ode to the aggressive drifter," but the real problem with Aggro Dr1ft is the entire absence of narrative. Obviously, this is nothing new for Korine, who has frequently warned his viewers to abandon hope upon entry to his uncompromising worlds. But here, the film is simply filled with gnomic statements, such as: “There is magic in this brutality.”
If there is a theme, it might be that “only love” can steer you back home from the bloodshed, but it’s hardly anything radical. All its stylistic innovations, as hard as they are to watch, could have been put to much better use. The press screening I attended featured multiple walkouts and an inevitable chorus of boos at the end, though you suspect this film will have its defenders in some quarters; whatever you think about Korine, he’s a one-off.
Perhaps the most notable aspect, aside from the infrared film, is an appearance by US rapper Travis Scott, whose brief role as a dreadlocked figure who Bo meets adds texture to the film. He even has a forked tongue, giving him a reptilian guise. For Korine, the film is being used as a launch for a new company, EDGLRD, which aims to produce films, fashion and other tie-ins.
Maybe it will mark a new cinematic revolution. But it’s likely this empty shell of a movie – a sickening sensory overload – will leave most viewers cold.
