In A Clockwork Orange , Alex and his friends break into a wealthy writer’s house and rape his wife, which would be bad enough if he hadn’t been singing “Singin’ in the Rain” in the process. Half a century later, the scene seems no less horrific, given the way Stanley Kubrick made such extreme violence seem like fun for the crazed children who were enacting it. Could there be anything more nihilistic than that?
Middle-aged bad boy Harmony Korine certainly thinks so. His latest film from the taboo-breaking studio EDGLRD, Invasion of the Kids, blurs the lines between real life and thorny video game so much that it’s hard to tell what we’re watching for most of the film’s 79 minutes.
Looking for first-person footage of Florida homes being ransacked by screen-addicted sociopaths? Or creepy face-swapping technology that turns armed vandals into Gerber babies with devil horns? Or AI-generated vignettes of an elusive rabbit? Or a timeout from a spontaneous dance party? It’s all here, woven into an aggressive, experimental freestyle about what technology does to our minds — and what it can do to cinema, in turn.
Sure to upset most audiences, especially those who saw its Venice premiere, Invasion of the Children boldly (and often incoherently) combines ideas from the past decade and a half of Korine’s career, stretching back to the gratuitous crime-filled Breaking Spring and the utterly unclassifiable Scumbags. The project, which includes disturbing footage of Korine’s fellow rioters in rubber masks, is designed to feel like some kind of found artefact, like a film about dirty skateboarders that has been accidentally released.
“Baby Invasion” seeks a similarly sinister underground vibe, but proves more difficult to interpret, as Corinne wouldn’t dare attach anything clear as a message to this enigmatic song, other than the misleading line that says:
This is not a movie.
This is a game.
This is real life.
There is only now, the endless now.
But what exactly are we watching? “Invasion of the Children” presents itself as self-portraits from an illicit game—where criminals gang up on the mansions of the wealthy, hiding their identities behind AI-generated child avatars—that has leaked onto the dark web, where it has “taken on a life of its own.” What that means is left deliberately vague, with Spanish-speaking game developers in virtual reality headsets helping to weave its backstory. Where certainty is lacking, mythology takes over.
Like the terrifying videotape in the classic Japanese horror film Ringo, Invasion of the Children plays with your mind. The implication is that either feeble-minded players have begun to experience life as a game (collecting rewards for trivial achievements) or that an evil entity has adopted the technology so that it can manipulate people into committing such crimes in real life. This interpretation applies as much as we read home invasions as real-world wrongdoings—“straw dogs” on steroids. On the other hand, it’s likely that everything we see is virtual, just as the movie itself is merely staged, in which case Invasion of the Children immediately loses its edge.
Like last year’s “Aggro Dr1ft,” which attempted to bring the logic and visual language of video games to the screen, “Baby Invasion” is a bold attempt to electrocute Corrin using a medium that seems to have bothered him since he began tinkering with it as a teenager. Throughout that time, there’s a remarkable consistency in his approach, going back to “Kids” (which he wrote) and “Gummo” (which he directed). He’s like one of those little villains seen throwing scorpions at an anthill at the beginning of “The Wild Bunch,” where provocation seems to be the goal.
While other filmmakers almost universally adopted slow-motion digital effects, Korine turned to super-fast graphics cards and real-time rendering, distorting the footage as it was being shot. In both “Invasion of the Child” and “The Aggressive Doctor,” the effect is uniquely spaced out and amusing—a trick that would have surely astonished Brecht—as Korine exploits the rules of games.
For most of “Invasion of the Children,” we see either the point of view of a character identified only as “Yellow” (a viewpoint familiar enough to fans of first-person shooters, and confusing to others) or disembodied surveillance footage of the actual crime scene (some of it staged, the rest taken from on-site security cameras), with pop-up screens and other animations filling the screen. The way these missions work is that color-coded characters meet up, choose their weapons, and then head to their objective, which in this case is a long, tedious ride in a truck.
When players appear on screen, a green box hovers over their heads and the game engine draws a computer-generated baby in real time over their face. Sometimes it glitches, drawing extra baby heads in random places; other times, it blinks, revealing the players’ real faces for a split second. Either way, the effect isn’t as disruptive as it sounds. No one is going to misinterpret what they’re seeing as real child behavior, and no infants are harmed (or even included) in the process. In theory, the technology is meant to fool surveillance cameras. But how can that happen? It just hides their identities from all the other users watching the Twitch-like livestream, where their sarcastic comments appear in a continuous scroll on the right side of the screen.
Though it’s little more than a gimmick, the kid angle gives Corrin an experience that only intermittently engages his attention for most of its running time. Worse, Yellow seems reluctant, more of a passive spectator than an active participant, stepping out to use the bathroom and side-stepping the action to play side quests. In one such diversion, he wanders into the backyard to blow up eight-bit kaiju. In another, he participates in a rainbow bike race through the park. If that sounds less than adorable, you’re right.
Yet Korine remains tense throughout the film, as we never know what he has planned for us. The director’s editing style doesn’t jump between channels as much as in previous films, so many scenes linger longer than they should. Still, the underlying horror is clear: Yellow and the other participants are enjoying completely inappropriate behavior that is normalized by new technology.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is disturbing in part because there are no cops and no consequences. Invasion of the Children is less disturbing, because the violence is implied rather than explicit. Except for two men who appear to have been slaughtered, the victims are seen from a distance. As the film winds through the houses, the worst has already happened, and the heads of the corpses are covered with white sheets—a case in which restraint lessens the shock value.
All the while, a low, demonic soundtrack plays in the background, as a woman’s voice echoes around a creature, a demon, and a rabbit. If I didn’t know better, I would have guessed that the music was also AI-generated, though it’s credited to electronic musician Burial, just one of the adventurous collaborators willing to accompany Corrin on this wild ride (which seems more interesting to create than to consume). At one point, between raids, the camera floats through Edgefort’s headquarters, wandering through the CG corridors until it finds a set of screens with another home invasion mission to play.
To quote Quinn: “Is this the real world? Is this just fantasy?” And who is this mysterious creature, “Duck Mob”? Is this another pseudonym for Corrin, or are they the masked manipulation experts who occasionally appear? The problem with Corrin’s vague approach—which makes it impossible to distinguish between programmed chaos and computer-generated additions—is determining what and how we spend our energy trying to interpret it. Meaning may be elusive, if not nonexistent, but there is plenty to motivate us along the way.
