Euronews Culture’s Film of the Week: ‘Baby Invasion’

I’ve been putting off watching Baby Invasion for as long as I could, ever since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year. I’d been burned before with Harmony Korine’s first feature since starting his multidisciplinary, multimedia outfit called EDGLRD: the godawful AGGRO DR1FT. 

Still, open mind and all that – and considering his second movie has just been released online, I took it upon myself to finally see what the director-turned-troll had in store for audiences next, knowing that it couldn’t possibly be worse than the moronic guff he previously subjected viewers to. 

Well, watching Baby Invasion was humbling in this respect, because if AGGRO DR1FT made me almost burst a blood vessel due to how mind-numbingly irritating it was, Korine’s second venture with his production company is possibly worse. 

I say ‘venture’ at this point because calling Baby Invasion a film is charitable in the extreme. It’s the sort of thing that could have worked as part of an experimental installation. You know the kind – that looped video you endure for a few minutes in a darkened room before moving on to more genuinely envelope-pushing fare. 

Not that this description would perturb Korine in the slightest, as the provocateur has waxed lyrical about how traditional cinema is a drag to him and how he wants to create outside the boundaries of the seventh art. But if we’re to believe that he’s serious about his “post-cinema” kick, why release it at all? 

This question haunts me, as I muster the energy to come up with a readable skinny for Baby Invasion. 

It starts off promisingly enough with a short prologue featuring the interview of a remorseful game developer.

She explains that Baby Invasion was designed as a first-person shooter game “so realistic that the player would fall into a trance and begin to think that real life and the game were interchangeable.” The game sees players assume their role within a group of delinquents who invade large mansions and rob the rich. They manage to get away with it by using avatars of baby faces, thereby masking their identities.  

Before the game was completed, however, it was hacked and got leaked onto the dark web. There, it took a life of its own and people started to emulate the Baby Invasion experience in real life.  

“It was an unfortunate nightmare,” says the game developer. 

What follows is 80 interminable minutes of footage from the illicit game, featuring an abrasively shit techno score by British EDM producer Burial, acts of violence, viewer chat overlayed on top of the action, a few pop-ups here and there… and that’s about it. 

It’s braindead, lazy and gimmicky rubbish that could have been a 21st century Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer but instead chooses to pander to an audience namechecked by Korine’s depressingly appropriate production company name. 

The only upside: the rampant misogyny of AGGRO DR1FT has been replaced by AI-generated bunnies and an ASMR voice actress whispering about a rabbit getting lost in a hole.

Don’t ask.

And certainly don’t credit this film by making the argument that Baby Invasion is not meant to be narrative-driven or offer anything remotely enjoyable. Granted, it yearns to be an immersive experience, an alienating-and-repetitive-by-design commentary on how the lines have blurred between video games and real life… But it does so by flashing the words: “THIS IS NOT A MOVIE. THIS IS A GAME. THIS IS REAL LIFE. THERE IS JUST NOW. THE ENDLESS NOW.” 

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If you just guffawed or felt the pressing need to throw up because of how try-hard and vapid that edgelord manifesto sounds, you’d be right. (And feel free to keep in mind that those four sentences appear on screen while your POV avatar is flipping the bird with both hands.) 

The reality is that Baby Invasion is a puerile miasma of nothing, another empty provocation that doesn’t have the smarts to comment on life imitating art or the material to adequately satirize 2020s online culture and theimpact it has on young, impressionable (and usually male) minds. Like last year’s AGGRO DR1FT, it aims to trigger, but its provocation ends up feeling like the equivalent of that 14-year-old kid who’s just discovered the Sex Pistols for the first time, changes his wardrobe in a jiffy because mummy let him use some of the safety pins in her sowing box, and then brazenly asserting that he was always punk. 

In my review for AGGRO DR1FT, I wrote: “Whether intentionally repugnant or misunderstood in its irony, it really doesn’t matter. Unless you want to watch what happens to an aging provocateur desperately trying to get with the kids and whining about how he’s disillusioned with movies through his ludicrously named new company, you do well to avoid this one like the plague.” 

This remains applicable to Baby Invasion. I’d only add that this second EDGLRD venture at least has the decency of playing itself through the game developer at the start of this nose-bleedingly stupid film: this is “an unfortunate nightmare.”  

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Spot-on, madam.

Baby Invasion is out now online.