Baby Invasion (2025) review

Dir. Harmony Korine

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★½

NOTE: Baby Invasion is sold on Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD website in both “pure” and “impure” versions. After some erratic searching, I opted for the “pure” version. How I understand it, the “impure” version features narration omitted in the “pure” version.

When Baby Invasion — Harmony Korine’s latest work of post-cinema anarchy — premiered at the Venice International Film Festival back in August 2024, Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé spoke to the audience about Hollywood’s alienation of young filmmakers. The industry once nobly took chances on young visionaries like Steven Spielberg, but times have drearily changed. While wearing a green ski mask and chomping on a cigar, the Enter the Void filmmaker spoke about how Hollywood needs to try and engage and encourage young people by giving them a chance, and had a thoughtful opinion about why many modern mainstream movies feel like they came off an assembly line:

“Why we’re starting to see Hollywood crumble creatively is because they’re losing a lot of the most creative minds to gaming and to streaming. They’re so locked in on convention and then all those kids who are so creative are now just going to find other pathways and go to other places because movies are no longer the dominant art form.” – Gaspar Noé at the 87th Venice International Film Festival, per Variety

Following up on his thermal-drenched tone-poem Aggro Dr1ft, Baby Invasion is Korine’s second feature-length “film” from his creative technology company EDGLRD. Similarly, it abandons narrative and strives to be a visceral, reality-bending, line-burring, guerilla assault on the senses. It avoids conventional plot structure like a cat avoids water. Korine’s latest has more in common with a Twitch stream than it does an actual movie. The film was created by amalgamating artificial intelligence with video game engines; the latter employed so intimately that populating the left side of the screen is an ongoing “live” chat. I can only assume Korine and the many producers had an evening of fun doing their own postmodern commentary on their project, flooding the screen with emojis, sentences in various languages, and general gibberish.

Shockingly, Baby Invasion does provide a frame-story. It opens with a Tagalog video game designer talking about the titular work, a video game in which users play as members of a gang that break into rich people’s mansions. The delinquents themselves render themselves unrecognizable by using AI-generated baby-faced avatars. The designer explains how once the game found itself on the Dark Web, the lines between reality and virtual reality became ambiguous. What follows is deliberately ambiguous. It’s essentially a lengthy play-thru in which these baby-faced killers break into mansions, take the inhabitants hostage, kill them (mostly off-screen, disappointingly so), snort crushed pills, and collect bonuses for achievements.

Also a surprise is the vague context in which Korine offers via on-screen text early into the babies’ first robbery:

THIS IS NOT A MOVIE.
THIS IS A GAME.
THIS IS REAL LIFE.
THERE IS JUST NOW, THE ENDLESS NOW.

Being that Baby Invasion takes place within a game, it doesn’t have the same sort of visceral, brooding edge that Aggro Dr1ft so proudly boasted. One improvement, however, is the lack of dialog. Aggro Dr1ft was undone by downright awful dialog, so childishly vulgar it undercut its own unique visual style. The dialog in Baby Invasion is pretty scant, or relegated to text-boxes. EDM producer Burial crafts a vaguely demonic score that adds more character than any dialog the full-grown Rugrats could feasibly produce.

At a time when many filmmakers are dialing into the purposefully scuzzy, nostalgic flare of analog horror, Korine operates on a technological treadmill turned up to the highest setting, employing real-time rendering technology, graphic cards more common in the gaming realm, and ungainly AI creations. For POV, we mostly see the perspective of a character only known as “Yellow.” How the game works is various characters meet-up, choose from a wide-variety of semi-automatic to fully-automatic weapons, and then drive to their intended targets.

Korine pivots from the ultra-violent hellscape of Aggro Dr1ft mostly by making Yellow more passive than his fellow participants. He brandishes various weapons, but hardly uses them. His job is mostly manipulating hostages, or wandering away from the group to inspect the houses or embark on a motorcycle side-quest. He strikes me as the kind of gamer who would elect to play Grand Theft Auto and occasionally decide to obey the traffic signals and basic rules of the road.

Despite this, there is tension throughout Baby Invasion, especially given the large absence of dialog coupled with Burial’s score. The experience is sporadically immersive, mildly frustrating, and bravely experimental at times, particularly as Korine frequently incorporates rabbits as what I would assume is an attempt at symbolism. Damned if I can make rabbit heads or tails of it.

Baby Invasion has some vague similarities to Korine’s Trash Humpers, which, in hindsight, was analog horror in itself. That film was a sub-80 minute fever dream revolving around individuals in elderly masks engaging in perverse debauchery around their impoverished neighborhood, including, yes, humping trash cans. The crime-without-consequences and oft-intense, sensory overload-triggering visuals recall Spring Breakers. Even when he’s seemingly exploring new boundaries to push, Korine retains the hallmarks of his earlier (and admittedly, better) films. When he’s bound by something resembling a narrative, he’s at his best. So far, his EDGLRD works are most compelling thanks to the conversations and analysis they inspire. I am led to believe that a great project under this umbrella will remain elusive.

NOTE: Both the “pure” and “impure” versions of Baby Invasion are available to purchase and watch on the EDGLRD website.

Starring: Juan Bofill, Shawn Thomas, Steven Rodriguez, Antonio Jackson, and Tej Limlas Ly. Directed by: Harmony Korine.