Edglrd
The logline for the upcoming Harmony Korine film Baby Invasion, set to premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival, is as Harmony Korine as you’d expect. The new feature billed as a video game where viewers are players in a first-person shooter, taking on the role of “a group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars to conceal their identity.” Everything’s tracking so far, right? Here’s the surprise: the 80-minute film will sport an original soundtrack from Burial. That means, in theory, the next Burial album (his third ever and first after 2007’s Untrue) could be the soundtrack to a movie in which a gang are “tasked with entering mansions of the rich and powerful and leaving nothing behind.” As premises go, it’s pretty hard to resist.
Korine is in the middle of what feels like a renaissance period in terms of his reputation to a younger generation of film fans right now. He is tied up in the increasingly out of control Brat summer phenomenon, with Charli XCX adding a song named after his 2012 movie Spring Breakers to the deluxe edition of her lime green magnum opus. The dirtbag debauchery of that movie was described by The Ringer’s Adam Nayman last year as “belonging to a tradition of mainstream-adjacent satire that’s shamelessly blatant, gleefully offensive, and provocative to a fault.” Satire or not, the movie featured enough slow-mo shots of bikini-clad Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens in its opening minutes to make the couple in front of me walk out with audible disgust when I saw it in the theater.
Baby Invasion arrives as part of a new era for Korine, however. He’s not quite the same director who established his counter-cultural reputation with Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, staples of any rebellious teen’s DVD collection. In his place is a new Korine whose interest seems to be more focused on the conventions of filmmaking itself. Last year he released Aggro Dr1ft, a hit-man movie filmed in Miami using infrared photography. Speaking to Dazed, Korine said he’s “trying to make something post-cinema, this sensory feeling of being inside the film, something almost transcendental.” These “post-cinema” ambitions weren’t appreciated by cinema critics, with the movie carrying a 41% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Aggro Dr1ft was the first movie released since Korine established his “multidisciplinary design collective” EDGLRD in 2023. Korine previously told Variety that EDGLRD focuses on “designing entertainment and alternate forms of content.” He added, “It’s live action, with a really strong emphasis on video games and experimenting with the gamification of films.”
Inevitably, soul-sappingly, AI is involved, too. Baby Invasion incorporates AI and gaming engines to allow for audiences to “remix” the storyline, Korine has said. (As with all AI announcements, what that actually means, is unclear). “We’ll create these almost like freakish cartoon filters that these invaders will have, that they’ll wear throughout, but then you could also possibly change them as you go,” the director added.
It all feels a little flashy and attention-grabby for Burial, an artist who has maintained an enigmatic presence since he first emerged in the mid-2000s. Though he has allowed documentarian Adam Curtis to use his music repeatedly, until this year, Burial had not joined the line of underground artists moving into cinema (Baby Invasion will be his second score of the year alongside Andrea Arnold’s Bird. This aligns him with artists such as Mica Levi, Bobby Krlic (The Haxan Cloak, and Oneohtrix Point Never, all of whom have established indie movies as a home away from home for experimental musicians through their work with directors Jonathan Glazer, Ari Aster, and the Safdie Bros respectively. It’s going to be interesting to see how Burial translates his mix of ghostly U.K. garage beats, vinyl crackles, and more recent foray into ravey breakbeats into Korine’s button-pushing brand of film-making.
You can see where the dots between the two are connected. Korine’s interest in video games is matched by Burial, who has sampled Metal Gear Solid on “Archangel” and, in 2014, told fans to expect a long wait for new music while he played Dark Souls 2. The musicians that Korine works with, however, are usually maximalists whose work can be read as ostentatious and even vulgar: Skrillex co-scored Spring Breakers (which also featured a memorable guest appearance from Gucci Mane),Travis Scott appeared in Aggro Dr1ft, and his little-seen 2007 film Mister Lonely is about a Michael Jackson impersonator falling in love with a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. Perhaps it goes without saying, but Burial, an artist whose commitment to image preservation means he has shared a new selfie roughly once a decade, is no Skrillex. The clash of his and Korine’s dominant sensibilities makes me more excited for Baby Invasion than is probably wise. I might not want to remix what I see, but I am desperate to go in and experience it all.
