“A Clockwork Orange” opens with Alex DeLarge and his fellow droogs breaking into a rich writer’s home and raping his wife, which would be bad enough if he weren’t crooning “Singin’ in the Rain” in the process. Half a century later, the scene seems no less appalling, given the way Stanley Kubrick made such ultraviolence look like fun for the demented kids who were doing it. Could there be anything more nihilistic than that?
Middle-aged bad boy Harmony Korine certainly thinks so. The latest stunt from his taboo-razing EDGLRD studio, “Baby Invasion” blurs the lines between real life and a gnarly video game, so much so that it’s hard to tell what we’re watching for most of the trippy project’s 79-minute running time.
First-person footage of Florida McMansions ransacked by screen-addicted sociopaths? Creepy face-replacement technology that turns armed vandals into demon-horned Gerber babies? AI-generated cameos from an elusive CG rabbit? And time out for a spontaneous dance party? It’s all here, strung together in an aggressively experimental freestyle riff on what technology is doing to our minds — and what it can do for cinema, in turn.
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:
THIS IS NOT A MOVIE.
THIS IS A GAME.
THIS IS REAL LIFE.
THERE IS JUST NOW, THE ENDLESS NOW.
So what are we watching exactly? “Baby Invasion” presents itself as subjective footage from an illicit game — one in which delinquents gang up and break into rich people’s mansions, masking their identities behind AI-generated baby-face avatars — that was leaked onto the Dark Web, where it “took on a life of its own.” What that means is left deliberately ambiguous, as Spanish-speaking game developers in VR headsets help to spin its backstory. Where certainty lacks, mythology takes over.
Like the dreaded VHS tape in J-horror classic “Ringu,” “Baby Invasion” messes with your brain. The implication is that either weak-minded players have started to experience life as a game (collecting bonuses for inane achievements) or some nefarious entity has adapted the technology in such a way that he can manipulate people into committing such crimes IRL. That interpretation applies insofar as we read the home invasions as real-world wrongdoing — “Straw Dogs” on steroids. Then again, it’s just as likely that everything we’re seeing is virtual, the way the movie itself is just pretend, in which case, “Baby Invasion” instantly loses its edge.
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. In that time, there’s been a remarkable consistency to his approach, dating back all the way to “Kids” (which he wrote) and “Gummo” (which he directed). He’s like one of those hellions seen tossing scorpions on the anthill in the opening scene of “The Wild Bunch,” where the provocation seems to be the point.
Where other filmmakers have almost universally embraced photoreal, slow-to-render digital effects, Korine turned to ultra-fast graphic cards and real-time rendering technology, distorting the footage as it was being captured. In both “Baby Invasion” and “Aggro Dr1ft,” the effect is alternately distancing and uniquely immersive — a trick that almost surely would have blown Brecht’s mind — as Korine channels the grammar of gaming.
For much of “Baby Invasion,” we are seeing either the subjective POV of a dude identified only as “Yellow” (a familiar enough view for first-person-shooter aficionados, disorienting for others) or disembodied surveillance footage of the actual crime scenes (some of it staged, the rest taken from on-site security cameras), with pop-up screens and other animated graphics crowding the screen. The way these missions work, color-coded characters meet up and choose their weapons, then head to the target, which in this case is a long, boring van ride away.
When the players appear on screen, a green square hovers over their heads and the real-time gaming engine maps a CG baby over their real faces. Sometimes it glitches, drawing extra baby heads in random places; other times, it flickers, and the players’ real faces appear for a split second. Either way, the effect isn’t nearly as subversive as it sounds. No one would misinterpret what they’re watching as actual baby behavior, and no infants were harmed (or even included) in the process. In theory, the technology is meant to fool the surveillance cameras. But how could it? It merely hides their identities from all the other users tuning in to the Twitch-like live stream, whose snarky comments appear in a constant scroll on the right side of the screen.
Though little more than a gimmick, the baby angle gives Korine a hook for an experiment that’s only intermittently engaging for much of its running time. To make matters worse, Yellow seems ambivalent, more a passive spectator than an active participant, stepping out to use the toilet and wandering away from the action to play side quests. In one such disgression, he saunters out to the backyard to blast 8-bit kaiju. In another, he does a rainbow-skinned bike race through the gardens. If that sounds less than enthralling, you’re right.
Still, Korine maintains a nervous tension throughout, as we never know what he has planned for us. The director’s signature ADHD style (which leads to non-linear “and now for something completely different”-style editing in other films) doesn’t jump around nearly as much as it did in earlier films, causing many scenes to overstay their welcome. And yet, the underlying horror is clear: Yellow and the other participants are getting off on breaking into people’s homes. The game has somehow made that concept fun — or more fun than their real lives, at least — even though there doesn’t seem to be any way for them to lose.
Like “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,” it’s disturbing in part because there are no police and no consequences. “Baby Invasion” isn’t nearly as upsetting, mind you, since the violence is more implied than explicit. With the exception of two men seen with their throats slashed, the victims are seen at an abstract remove. As Mr. Yellow drifts through the houses, the worst has already been done, and corpses’ heads have been covered in white sheets — a case where restraint undercuts the shock value.
Through it all, a low, vaguely Satanic score churns in the background, while a woman’s voice drones on about a creature, a demon and a rabbit. If I didn’t know better, I would have guessed the music had been generated by AI as well, though it’s credited to electronic musician Burial, just one of the adventurous collaborators willing to go along with Korine on this wild ride (one that seems far more interesting to create than it is to consume). At one point, between raids, the camera floats through Korine’s EDGLRD headquarters, roaming the CG hallways until it finds a bank of monitors with another home invasion to experience.
To quote Queen, “Is this the real world? Is this just fantasy?” And who is this mysterious Duck Mobb? Is that another pseudonym for Korine, or are they the skull-masked master manipulators who appear at times? The trouble with Korine’s ambiguous approach — which makes it impossible to distinguish between scripted mayhem and computer-generated add-ons — comes in deciding what and how to spend our energy attempting to interpret. Meaning may be elusive, if not altogether nonexistent, but there’s plenty to trigger us along the way.
