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‘Baby Invasion’ Review: Harmony Korine’s Latest Brain-Barf Synthesizes a Career’s Worth of Big Ideas
With patience-testing satire 'Baby Invasion,' the boundary-obliterating director of 'Aggro Dr1ft' both embraces and critiques video game technology.
Bound to alienate most audiences, especially those who caught its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, “Baby Invasion” audaciously (and often incoherently) combines ideas from the last decade and a half of Korine’s career, tracing back to “Spring Breakers” (with its gratuitous crime sprees) and his radically unclassifiable “Trash Humpers.” That project, which featured disturbing footage of Korine’s cohorts making mischief in rubber old-man masks, was designed to feel like some kind of found artifact, as if a grubby skater video-cum-snuff film had inadvertently gone public. “Baby Invasion” strives for a similarly ominous underground vibe, but proves even trickier to interpret, as Korine wouldn’t dare attach anything so square as a message to this cryptic head-scratcher, other than the red herring that reads: As with last year’s “Aggro Dr1ft,” which tried to port the logic and visual language of video games over to film, “Baby Invasion” represents a bold attempt to electroshock a medium that seems to have bored Korine since he started jimmying with it as a teenager.
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