Harmony Korine’s High-Octane Aggro Dr1ft Gets Heated

Almost nothing about Aggro Dr1ft, the latest film by cult director and creative polymath Harmony Korine, hews to convention. A lurid fantasia about a bloodthirsty yet conflicted Miami hitman hellbent on assassinating a demonic crime lord, the film’s garish palette and depraved subject matter are tough on the eyes, even at its lean 80-minute runtime. It was shot with thermal cameras from NASA and underwent extensive post-production treatment using AI, yielding narcotic visuals that fuzz its meandering plot and caused fainting and nausea at festival circuit screenings, where it was critically panned. Not that the film’s 36 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating matters—the technology Korine used to create the film lets it be constantly altered and updated, and he wasn’t even trying to appeal to cinephiles in the first place.

Korine was more inspired by the loops of TikTok and how the aesthetics of video games are seeping into the wider culture, as well as his forever muse: youthful transgressions. That may explain why his newly formed multimedia collective EDGLRD eschewed a traditional cinematic release and opted instead to kick off Aggro Dr1ft’s national tour at a Hollywood strip club. “What we’re leaning into with this company is a more expansive approach to creativity,” Eric Kohn, EDGLRD’s head of film strategy and development, told the New York Times. “We’re trying to engineer a new way to get this kind of work out into the world that isn’t beholden to the limited economics of the film market. You’ve never seen a movie in a strip club before, but you’ve also never seen a movie like this before.”

Last week’s screening drew a raucous crowd of roughly 400 attendees eager to be transported directly into the action: men in ski masks brandishing machine guns, strippers gyrating in giant cages, fast cars, stacks of cash, street brawls. That didn’t quite play out at the club, but the acid-soaked visuals lent themselves well to the dusky environs as dancers in pasties worked the poles and viewers took in the “tropical noir” psychodrama. The screening was followed by live DJ sets courtesy of film score composer Araabmuzik and Korine himself, both donning neon-hued demon masks and accompanied by a crew of men wearing white hazmat suits and women in ghost makeup and neon wigs.

Following its Los Angeles debut, EDGLRD plans to bring the Aggro Dr1ft viewing experience to even more unconventional venues across the country. Though Korine and EDGLRD’s creative director Joao Rosa have even bigger plans: “Basically seeing what we can make, how far you can push the medium,” Korine says. “It’s also, really, at its core, just a way of trying to have fun again with all this stuff. We’ll be making anything—from filters to features and games—and creating our own platform. It’s a way to circumvent a lot of the traditional system.”