Baby Inva­sion – first-look review

Since he estab­lished his new ven­ture EDGLRD in 2023, Har­mo­ny Korine has been bang­ing the drum about tra­di­tion­al cin­e­ma not being inter­est­ing to him any­more, vow­ing to instead cre­ate art that exists out­side agreed upon para­me­ters. So far this has result­ed in his infra-red action movie Aggr0 Dr1ft (bad), a col­lec­tion of plas­tic demon masks (yours for the low price of $1500 a pop) and two gallery shows (of paint­ings inspired by Aggro Dr1ft). While it’s nice that Korine is inspired by the Mia­mi fun­house he’s put togeth­er of artists, gamers, ​“cre­atives” and mis­chief mak­ers, it’s a shame that EDGLRD’s out­put so far has been uni­form­ly under­whelm­ing, devoid of the iden­ti­ty and ideas that made the filmmaker’s more con­ven­tion­al cin­e­ma (if Korine could ever have been described as such) engag­ing even when it was divi­sive. This los­ing streak con­tin­ues with Baby Inva­sion, a ​“film” that emu­lates the style of a first-per­son shoot­er game with play­ers’ iden­ti­ties obscured by gen­er­at­ed images of baby faces, who car­ry out home inva­sions on the wealthy.

It starts off promis­ing­ly enough, with an EDGLRD employ­ee explain­ing that she cre­at­ed the game to try and play with the idea of a game that could induce a hyp­not­ic impact on the play­er, but it was then leaked in a hack­ing inci­dent and caused wide­spread chaos as play­ers couldn’t dis­tin­guish real­i­ty from fan­ta­sy, caus­ing an uptick in vio­lent rob­beries out­side of the vir­tu­al world. The film then cuts to a sim­u­lat­ed live feed of a Baby Inva­sion play­er and his posse as they suit up to make some fast cash, tot­ing guns and smok­ing blunts. A con­stant­ly refresh­ing chat feed occu­pies the left half of the screen with the audi­ence com­men­tat­ing on what they’re watch­ing. ​“Livin tha gta life” one com­ment reads, which feels like a sum­ma­tion of EDGLRD’s under­stand­ing and inter­est of video games.

To this end, Baby Inva­sion attempts to sim­u­late a video game while lack­ing the ele­ments that have made gam­ing a unique art form, such as com­pelling nar­ra­tive, inter­est­ing graph­ics and – most impor­tant­ly – a sat­is­fy­ing game­play loop. This is the mechan­ic which sucks play­ers in for hours at a time, and despite the fact Baby Inva­sion is only 80 min­utes long, it seems to drag because there is end­less rep­e­ti­tion that extends beyond the gener­ic graph­ics and even Burial’s thump­ing, unre­lent­ing score (which involves a lengthy, equal­ly repet­i­tive mono­logue about rab­bits) to the plot (or lack there­of). If Baby Inva­sion is tru­ly inspired by gam­ing, it cer­tain­ly doesn’t under­stand it, appear­ing as a pale imi­ta­tion of the FPS genre rather than some­thing that push­es the enve­lope or our col­lec­tive under­stand­ing of what a video game – or a film – looks like. Ges­tures at live stream­ing cul­ture and the preva­lence of sur­veil­lance in a world where every­one has a super­com­put­er in their pock­et are all very well, but Korine’s Gen X sen­si­bil­i­ties sneak in, com­ing across more as a PSA about the poten­tial dan­gers of VR than any sort of chimeric act of cre­ative revolution.

Per­haps Baby Inva­sion would work bet­ter as a VR instal­la­tion, or a down­load­able, playable expe­ri­ence where one gets a bet­ter sense of its immer­sive qual­i­ties because what’s put on the screen here doesn’t com­pare in nov­el­ty or scope to some of the dynam­ics mod­ern games employ (Hideo Koji­ma had mil­lions of gamers using their con­troller to sim­u­late rock­ing a baby in a syn­thet­ic uterus with Death Strand­ing some five years ago) so it all feels like a hol­low provo­ca­tion based on a dat­ed under­stand­ing of how and why peo­ple game. At least Aggro Dr1ft, as shal­low and misog­y­nis­tic as it was, had a visu­al style (even if it wasn’t a good one) and a loose nar­ra­tive struc­ture. Baby Inva­sion does away with any attempt at either, set­tling instead for shot after shot of men tot­ing guns or flip­ping the bird. We do at least get POV shots of the ​“lead” char­ac­ter uri­nat­ing and defact­ing, which indi­cates the direc­tion of humour present with­in team EDGLRD and prob­a­bly the age demo­graph­ic most like­ly to get a kick out of it. There will always be an appetite for Korine’s par­tic­u­lar brand of vio­lent fan­ta­sy, but despite the vol­ume of the work being pro­duced by EDGLRD, not one part of it is well-exe­cut­ed, inter­est­ing only as a van­i­ty project for peo­ple with more mon­ey than sense rather than for the val­ue of its cre­ative output.