‘Baby Invasion’ review: Harmony Korine’s hypnotic, gaming-inspired nightmare

After Aggro Dr1ft last year, Harmony Korine has once again made the most galaxy-brained movie of the Venice International Film Festival, Baby Invasion. A work that takes the form of a messed up livestream, the filmmaker’s new video game-inspired nightmare is wildly, oppressively hypnotic, even though it eventually runs out of places to go.

The edgelords at Korine’s vowel-less EDGLRD production house feel less like traditional filmmakers, more like a collective of media enthusiasts running wackadoodle experiments. Observe them from afar and you might find pretentious faux-intellectualism on the future of cinema; Korine claims that this is what movies will soon be like. It’s a hard notion to take seriously.

But should you choose to submit to the work regardless, you’ll be treated to a stunning example of what movies can be right now, with a strong dose of eerie premonition about where the world at large might be headed — if it isn’t already there.

What is Baby Invasion about?

Baby Invasion opens with a brief interview clip with a fictitious Filipina game developer — who, for some strange reason, doesn’t remove her VR headset. She explains the concept for a game she created that was unfortunately leaked on the internet: a first-person-shooter (FPS) in which assailants disguise their faces with those of babies. Furthermore, its popularity on some corners of the web inspired people to go out and re-create its core concept in real life, and broadcast their crimes via livestream.

This deeply fucked-up idea is, in its entirety, the movie’s premise. It takes the form of screenlife cinema, from the point of view of someone watching and interacting with one such online stream, though given that the eponymous baby invaders wear helmet-mounted cameras, the film itself may as well be a first-person shooter movie, like Hardcore Henry. Using AI facial filters (à la TikTok and Snapchat), a cult-like group dressed in horned black hoodies obscure their appearance with the trend-requisite images of baby faces, as they collect ammunition and travel between various Florida mansions in a covert van.

The screen is filled with a Twitch-like scrolling community chat on the left-hand side (in various languages, and with its own memes and internal lingo), alongside graphics and other statistical displays. However, at very few points is the actual audio of this stream ever heard. Instead, it’s overlaid with an extremely lengthy, constantly morphing rave track by producer Burial, accompanied by whispers about a rabbit-like creature. As the film’s parameters become clear, so too does that of the streamers, who point their guns at wealthy hostages for fun and — it would seem — commit grisly murders just off-screen.

“Crimson towel!” numerous viewers type into the chat, referring to the blood-soaked face coverings over filmed bodies strewn about, as though this were some familiar trope or community reaction. The assailants’ baby disguises may be strange, but they’re hardly the most perverse part of the whole affair: that would be the casual cruelty and dehumanization on display in the stream, towards women in particular, which becomes part of the movie’s self-reflexive point.

Baby Invasion taps into distinctly modern forms of violence

As with the video game influences in Aggro Dr1ft, Korine appears fixated with the collision of gaming and real-world violence. Of course, the idea that video games are some root cause of violent outbursts has long been exaggerated, but the movie, like video games themselves, exists in a violent world that adopts the language of mass media. More tame real-world examples include video creators impersonating Grand Theft Auto, and streamers pretending to be video game characters (specifically NPCs or “non-playable characters”) and accepting input via emojis.

Unfortunately, this adoption of gaming language has a darker side. For instance, NPC has become an epithet meant to imply someone is devoid of personality or humanity, which is the next logical step in an online culture intent on dehumanizing its targets. In Baby Invasion, distressed hostages immediately have their reactions screencapped and turned into memes, reducing their plight to content meant for easy consumption. The closer they are to being killed, the more filters are applied to their person, obscuring their humanity.

The more the movie lingers in this first-person perspective, the more it disturbingly places viewers in the mindset of such terrorists, and in doing so, Baby Invasion calls to mind real mass shootings and violent crimes which have been livestreamed — the Christchurch mosque shooting that was streamed live on YouTube and Facebook, and a Michigan murder that was broadcast on Facebook are just two examples.

If there’s something missing from Baby Invasion, it’s the actual, sickening outcomes of the crimes themselves. The victims are living, breathing people in one moment, gone the next, with the actual act of execution having been obscured. Perhaps it’s a violation of the guidelines of the fictional streaming platforms of the film themselves, but this missing piece is thematically vital too. Should we, as viewers, want to see the complete picture? Without realizing it, we might be complicit in Korine’s portrait of a world gone mad as soon as we realize there’s more to the story, and something we’re prevented from seeing.  

Baby Invasion is an arresting experience — up to a point

The film is also self-reflexive about who its audience is, and who the participants in the stream might be. A small window pops up on occasion, with teens in colorful skull masks watching the stream, as though it were from their vantage (or on their screens) that the film was playing out. Not only does the movie dictate who its audience is — in terms of their macabre desires, and how they mold themselves — but it speculates on who the shooters might be in the strangest fashion. The stream boots up with an EDGLRD logo. The shooters wear EDGLRD insignia, and the horns they wear resemble the masks worn in Aggro Dr1ft. Are they fans who might’ve misinterpreted that movie as a call to violence, or simply adopted its aesthetics?

Korine is just as culpable as the rest of the culture, it would seem. But this is, in a way, freeing for him as a filmmaker. It verges on offering Korine carte blanche to do, essentially, whatever he wants in the realm of cinematic debauchery. As much as the screen may be cluttered by graphics and text, there’s a distinct realism to the online world we see, and how the people within it interact and operate. We don’t see much of the bloodshed in the moment, though the movie does feature disturbing flashes of what appears to be separate stabbing attacks shot with a more rudimentary camera — as though this were some flashback or memory, or ghost in the machine.

However, there are times when the very reality of the film is called into question, rendering the aforementioned stabbing a potential peek into the real world from, perhaps, an unreal one. The game designer in the prologue talks about her intent to blur the virtual and real worlds, and the entrancing effect of Baby Invasion often does just that, lulling its more willing viewers into a state of arrest, to the point that even its most realistic images become mere stimuli. But then the stream takes odd turns, and the shooters find themselves in a metaverse of sorts, peeking out at the real events they perpetrate. Perhaps this is some quirk of the stream or real life “game” — we are, at the end of the day, witnessing what other viewers might see on a screen — but there are also moments where digital recreations of real environments so closely resemble the real thing that it’s genuinely hard to tell the difference.

Figuring out the distinction (or even wanting to) is sort of irrelevant. Baby Invasion doesn’t exactly have a plot beyond the shooters’ violent depravity, and so there’s only so long one can be swept up in its techno madness, despite its mere 80-minute runtime. However, that it takes these detours at all is terrifying enough, and provides just enough room for speculation. In a movie where desensitization lies at the root of everything, the notion of whether something feels real (regardless of whether it is) becomes the most pressing question. If fiction can be made to feel like reality, then so too can reality become fiction, giving way to everything from conspiracy theories to bullets and bloodshed.

Baby Invasion was reviewed out of its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival.