Harmony Korine‘s multimedia design collective EDGLRD may be a fresh-faced company, but the director is taking it one step further by using baby faces for AI avatars in his latest feature, “Baby Invasion.”
The ultra-realistic, multiplayer FPS game (which is also billed as a film) follows a group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars to conceal their identity. The official synopsis reads: “Tasked with entering mansions of the rich and powerful, players must explore every rabbit hole before time runs out. As players navigate this dark web-leaked game, the boundaries between the digital and the real world blur.”
“Baby Invasion” made its world premiere out of competition at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, where IndieWire film editor Ryan Lattanzio wrote in the review that Korine’s pioneering vision purposefully subverts any audience expectations.
“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,” Lattanzio wrote, “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. […] ‘Baby Invasion’ has a clear focus: 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.”
Lattanzio continued, “‘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.”
Korine’s divisive “Aggro Dr1ft” was the first EDGLRD release; it too debuted at Venice during the 2023 festival.
“[If] you’re not messing with the form a little bit, then what’s the point?” Korine told IndieWire of both “Aggro Dr1ft” and “Baby Invasion,” adding, “We’re making films now in gaming engines and working on a movie now that takes place in your living room, or in your bedroom. A horror film where the characters pop out of the closet. We’re at a place now where the level of tech is really starting to parallel my dreams. And this idea of world creation, and even what comes after linear cinema is exciting. You try and imagine ‘How do you deconstruct it, how do you mess with it? How do you create mini worlds?’ But doing a lot of that in rooms with our coders and VFX and artificial intelligence. It does tell a story, but it’s really meant to wash over you. It’s closer to ‘How do you create a digital hypnosis or a tech drug?’”
Check out the trailer for “Baby Invasion” below.
