‘Baby Invasion’ Review: Harmony Korine’s Disturbing First-Person Shooter Doesn’t Care What You Think of It
Harmony Korine is going to do whatever the hell he wants, and in the case of his disturbing and anti-audience movie “Baby Invasion,” he turns the trigger-junkie protagonist at the top of a video game into the eyes and ears of a motion picture. If that’s what you call this disquieting and sickeningly compelling new project, framed from the perspective of an assassin pillaging shiny happy McMansions in Florida, Korine’s haunting grounds of late from “Spring Breakers” to his disastrously boring “film” “Aggro Dr1ft” last year. Where that infrared twisted techno dance pivoted on desperate dancers and sex workers twerking into the void as a hired killer fired shots all around them, “Baby Invasion” has a clearer focus this time: It’s to make you, the viewer, feel bad, and often wanting to beg to the screen, “Please god let this end,” or perhaps more aptly, “end me.” Here is a filmmaker who, these days, resents his own audience. Here is a movie for no one.
Unsurprisingly, that’s a perverse sort of compliment for the director of “Gummo” and “Julien Donkey-Boy,” whose “Baby Invasion” is luridly hypnotic on visual terms even as thematically it seems to have nothing to say. We are all addled and deranged beings in the hypersexualized and hyperpigmented world of live-streaming, Twitching, gaming, and content absorption via tiny screens sucking our garbage souls, and “Baby Invasion” doesn’t pretend otherwise. This film — again, if that’s what we are meant to call it — grafts AI-generated images of baby’s faces onto home invaders who, when not standing around looking for direction, are unloading canisters of bullets into innocent, stupid heads. Anyone who has ever played a first-person shooter video game will find something to love — again, a word I am unsure about employing here — in “Baby Invasion’s” ticking clock of mayhem as artillery is collected, and health points upped by floating coins, and a POV erected that seems to be guided by some kind of mystical rabbit.
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Did you ever play the classic Nintendo 64 game “GoldenEye,” and while doing so, did you ever try to shoot at the butts of the peripheral non-characters bouncing around? Their sort of clueless, frazzled drifting, dictated by the tempos of a machine-learning device in the days before that was A Thing, will give you a taste as to how the outside characters (again, a word I am loath to use here) squirm about in the frames of “Baby Invasion.” Korine thinks this is the future of cinema, a cinema swallowed up by home streaming devices and video gaming that deserves something better, fitter, happier than the images passively projected on silver screens. If this is the future of the movies, I am not totally sure I want to be a part of it.
But in a moment for the movies when narrative storytelling shoves what it thinks we want to feel – while probably recognizing that, yeah, we do want to feel that way — down the human toilets of our souls, “Baby Invasion” is not interested at all in what you think about it. This film does not care if you watch it, react to it, or even if you are alive or dead. Its disregard for the audience is gutsy on Korine’s part, a filmmaker who has long not just pushed buttons, but shoved them down your stupid throat and then smashed your trash head against the wall while daring you to look away even when you physically can’t. As much as you might crave to.
“Baby Invasion” premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival to a pretty rapturous reception — an ideal outcome after last year’s “Aggro Dr1ft,” as this critic observed, literally sent viewers climbing out of their seats begging for respite. How much can we stand of a movie that offers no narrative value, has no characters, no moral judgment, no viewpoint, and instead plays out onscreen with the urgency of a death wish unfulfilled? Korine, who started the company Edglrd in recent years to package his bizarre and off-putting projects while shepherding those similar from others, seems to believe that whatever “Baby Invasion” is housing is the key to the evolution of cinema. That’s upsetting if true, but in a crippled moment for the creativity of the art form from the multiplexes to the arthouse, we might as well listen in.
In the often incoherent experiment that is “Baby Invasion,” you are put into the viewfinder of a video game killer and in a game you are not allowed to play. Yet there is curiously a lack of actual violence onscreen — only the aftermath of what’s implied, as the protagonist surveys head-exploded bodies and wealthy blondes bleeding out against bleaching sunlight and sterilely arranged patio furniture. Running parallel to what’s captured onscreen are often hilarious user comments — “flirting with the edge of the abyss,” “body count running up like my procrastination,” “welcome to the end of joy,” “memory lane is a dead end,” they write. The protagonist is, I think, called Mr. Yellow, one in a group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars. The wall-to-wall trippy rabbit hole of a world Korine has constructed is an immersive environment that shapeshifts as Yellow moves through it. Or is it us who are doing that?
Being strapped in your seat in a theater watching this film feels closer to a visual prison than an actual moviegoing experience, but Korine doesn’t give a shit about your comfort. Again, I sort of prayed for oblivion while in my own seat, but I was strangely hypnotized throughout. Korine is conditioning you to and asking you to question the very disturbances his film seeks to comment against, and I have to say he’s a bold visionary for taking us there at all. To places we don’t love to go. Game over, TKO, and nothing but transfixing pain to get us to his point. Which is what, exactly? I don’t know. Do I want to watch this movie again? Absolutely not. Will I forget it? Sure won’t.
Grade: B
“Baby Invasion” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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