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Viewers uninitiated in online video and gaming culture could watch this and not have the first idea what they were looking at
Harmony Korine is one of American cinema’s most tireless provocateurs – and after experiencing the Spring Breakers director’s latest project, I will admit to having been well and truly provoked. Baby Invasion, which premiered at Venice tonight, may be the stupidest film I have ever seen. And I use the word “may” only because I’m not entirely sure this thing actually is a film in the first place.
For the most part, it’s a recreation of a fictional video game called Baby Invaders: a photorealistic first-person shoot ’em up in which players rob elite beachside mansions and torture and murder their owners, while their faces are overwritten by AI-generated images of gurgling tots.
A brief prologue, positioned as an interview with the game’s remorseful creator, fills in the backstory: before development on Baby Invaders was complete it leaked onto the dark web, where players became so spellbound by its nihilistic joys that they began carrying out real-life raids in tribute – which, like rounds of the game itself, were live-streamed to a hungry online audience.
The film toggles between games of Baby Invaders and a couple of these real-world break-ins. The difference between the two is rarely immediately obvious, but as a series of early on-screen captions point out: THIS IS NOT A MOVIE. THIS IS NOT A GAME. THIS IS NOT REAL LIFE. THERE IS NO MORE REAL LIFE.
In place of audible dialogue is a story about a rabbit told in whispery voice-over, but rendered almost impossible to follow by the deafening techno soundtrack. And while the baby invaders have their fun, a constant stream of text chat rattles up the left hand side of the screen, as putative live-stream viewers make observations including “this sum nightmare fuel”, “this is peak humanity” and “that baby got that rizz”.
For those not au courant with Gen Alpha slang, rizz means charisma – and Baby Invasion has no intention of allowing latecomers to catch up. In fact it’s entirely possible that viewers not already steeped in contemporary online culture – and its video and gaming branches specifically – could watch Baby Invasion and not have the first idea what they were looking at.
Korine unerringly captures the look and spirit of cutting-edge moving imagery in 2024 – which is to say his film’s an eyesore. Readers familiar with Skibidi Toilet, the popular YouTube animated series in which sentient lavatories lay waste to the earth, will recognise its shatteringly ugly aesthetic at play here: look out for the enormous, cackling, disembodied baby’s head which emerges from the sea, or the giant baby that rears up like Godzilla and starts shooting fireballs from its hands. Gimmicks are also borrowed from popular battle royale games such as Fortnite: while the first round of Baby Invasion “loads”, for instance, we watch the player slashing mindlessly at thin air with two combat knives for around five minutes.
If there were some sort of discernible commentary here, Baby Invasion might have been easier to take. But it feels less interested in deconstructing the all-garish, all-ghoulish cacophony of 2020s online visual culture than just lobbing a bit more on the heap.
Cert TBC, 80 min. Screening at the Venice Film Festival; UK release TBC