they need to make a 'you are not immune to propaganda' t-shirt except it's 'you are not immune to vaporwave aesthetics', or even better, 'you are not immune to movies about assassins' -- i'm guilty on both charges.

harmony korine seems like a goofy provocateur, but he sure can direct a hell of a picture, and i don't think this is a put-on or a prank, it's a very earnest film about ethics, aging, family, love, all those wholesome things -- the creamsicle glow of these images is something i find so dreamy and comforting, like the floating rainbow spots on your eyes after you stare too long into the sun. that plus the elliptical narration makes AGGRO DR1FT reminiscent of the heat-blasted hallucinations found in the novels of william burroughs, especially the soft machine, where the repetition of images and words reduces the individuated meaning of any particular image/word and we're instead drawn into the prophetic trance-flow of word-after-word, images bleeding and throbbing past their own baroscopic temperature -- the scene where a drone zooms up past a dead body and the infrared pixels dilate and compress and we see the surrounding landscape suddenly flattened out into a google maps photograph was simply one of the most breathtaking moments in the recent cinema.

what i love the most about this is that harmony korine doesn't give a shit at all that any of this might look or sound janky -- the combination of an albert pyun-esque plot, the steam-of-consciousness montage and late godardian digital materiality blows past any notions of what a film is 'supposed' to present itself as in the standardized tradition of american realism. AGGRO DR1FT, despite the aggression promised in the title, really is more of a sustained chilly mood piece in the jess franco/maya deren lineage, where the film must be taken in its totality as a dislocation of one's consciousness, and if you're willing to match your own energy with this picture, it does succeed with flying colors.