‘Baby Invasion’ Venice Film Festival Review: Harmony Korine Doesn’t Level Up With His Latest Video Game-Inspired Film

“Anyone invested in cinematic form ought to tune in here out of sheer curiosity if nothing else,” I wrote earlier this year when issuing a tentative endorsement to Harmony Korine’s experimental cinema work AGGRO DR1FT. The director’s follow-up project for his new media venture EDGLRD, Baby Invasion, nearly exhausts the reserve of morbid curiosity needed as a driving force to power through the increasing tedium of his work. This film is one by and for a society overstimulated by screens, but it has little to offer beyond a vivid recreation of a video gamer’s sound and fury.

The aim of Baby Invasion becomes obvious from its opening scene, an unabashed exposition dump from the game developers of Baby Invaders. This first-person shooter game, which uses AR technology to superimpose babies’ faces over players involved in robbing the rich, becomes so powerful that it lulls participants into a trance-like state. The creators realized the spillover effects into the real world and attempted to put the genie back in the bottle, but a Romanian gang released it onto the dark web where it inspired a string of IRL emulators.

Korine’s immersive visuals, which emulate the desktop cinema format popularized by works like Unfriended and Searching, aim to achieve a similarly hypnotic effect on its viewers … with the occasional pop-up ad touting penis enlargement pills for the lulz. Baby Invasion backfires remarkably by inspiring boredom with all its bombast. Even a mere 80 minutes trapped inside its mainframe feels far longer because any amusement its silly shitposter-style schtick generates wears thin instantly. Add in some disembodied narration weaving a parallel tale of a mythical rabbit, and a feeling of mind-numbing monotony quickly sets in.

Unlike AGGRO DR1FT, which evokes a broad experience of interactive violent entertainment, Baby Invasion takes video games as its very subject given the way its online behavior spirals out into the real world. Once Korine establishes the relentless “AI slop” aesthetic, and the Twitch-style live commentary feed on the left hand of the frame begins fading into white noise, it’s fair to start wondering if the film has any substance undergirding its sensations. The film’s greatest strength is that it does understand the crypto-bro, edgelord “manoverse” that drives such crass content to take off online, yet it has no interest in offering any commentary on them.

Baby Invasion can hide behind simply recreating the perverse pleasures of a vindictive video game, but the trolling choices with which Korine presents perspective are clear and conscious. These may be active shooters, but the film renders their antics in passive voice. The film displays the aftermath of their robberies, such as heads in a bag bloodied by the single bullet they took, but it never attributes these outcomes to their actions. They are pornographers of violence, not mere perpetrators.

And for a film simulating real-time play to the point that it includes some cheeky time on the toilet, eliding actual violence amounts to sanitizing the pleasures Korine is too scared to admit are misguided. Korine, ever the enfant terrible, pre-emptively needles the moralist critique of his film by daring audiences to clutch their pearls. He wheels out a wheelchair-bound potential victim during the stick-up as little more than a prop to generate condemnation of the gamers. But it’s such a transparent ploy to piss people off that it backfires, inciting ire against the movie at large rather than just its characters.

No amount of tacked-on divine retribution for their crimes at the film’s close can disguise the true sympathies of Baby Invasion. Korine’s allegiance lies with the invaders because they share a common spirit of riling up the powerful and the privileged with their pointed provocations. He can mask that in aesthetic appreciation and technological innovation, but it’s little more than a thin veneer covering a self-aggrandizing work of simplistic spectacles.

Besides, Korine has already made a masterpiece about the incursion of video game logic into real life. It’s called Spring Breakers. Korine’s trippy take on youthful pleasure managed to be innovative, insightful, and interesting as it depicts the slippery slope of carnality into carnage. Here, he’s running on fumes playing childish computer games on a film with four credited “AI whisperers.”

Baby Invasion premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. EDGLRD has not announced any distribution plans for the film at this time.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.