Like nothing you’ve ever seen, Aggro Dr1ft strives to create not simply something new, but The New, delivering a barrage of sound and image that amalgamates the old and familiar into a fresh, hallucinatory cinematic vision. It’s brilliant. It’s tacky. It’s exhilarating. It’s wearisome. There’s no middle ground with this boundary-pushing whatsit, which will earn reactions as diverse and heated as the various elements that comprise its wholly unique 80 minutes. Destined to be passionately adored and despised, it’s a provocation, a stunt, a dare, and an experiment—as well as a bold one-of-a-kind experience that, following its polarizing debut at numerous 2023 festivals, shouldn’t be missed when it arrives in domestic theaters beginning May 10.
Aggro Dr1ft is the beastly offspring of many mothers and fathers, playing like the bastard progeny of Grand Theft Auto, Scarface, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and kindred action and crime sagas, all of it fashioned with terrifying and trashy gangland and strip-club aesthetics. Korine shoots his film in eye-searing infrared (via thermal NASA cameras) that makes everything pulsate in blazing reds, yellows, purples, pinks, and blacks, such that it approximates what it might be like to see the world after staring for too long at a solar eclipse.
Gliding along and rotating about as if in a dream, the director’s cinematography is at once entrancing and off-putting, and that conflict is further exacerbated by visuals that throb with unholy X-ray malevolence. Faces and bodies flash bio-mechanical veins and tendrils that resemble modernized versions of H.R. Giger’s iconic designs, suggesting a marriage of man and machine, not to mention the mortal and the holy—all of which is embodied by the story’s protagonist.
