In Aggro Dr1ft, Florida Man Harmony Korine Turns Miami Into a Tropical Dystopia

Harmony Korine is out of his element. He's in London for the opening of his new art show at Hauser & Wirth, and he seems a bit lost.

"What is this park? I dunno what the fuck this is, it's just green, it's got grass."

The leafy expanses of London — Grosvenor Square, to be precise — are just about as far from the sweltering Miami climes of Miami as one can get, vibes-wise at least. Korine has made his home in Florida since 2015, moving between Palm Beach and Miami, where he now lives and keeps a studio in the Design District.

"It's probably the only place that I could imagine living," the director says. "I moved here with my family a decade ago, I didn't really know anybody at the time. But I just loved the way it looks; I loved the way it felt — the sky, the sunsets, the ocean, the geography. The fact that it was, in some ways, so inscrutable. And the clash of cultures; the mix of high and low. I always just felt like Florida, but Miami in particular was, I guess it's part of America, but it feels like its own world."

Korine has truly become a creature of the Sunshine State, and his recent trilogy of Florida-set films could form a kind of conceptual saga about the three ages of Florida Man. Spring Breakers, released in 2012, reflects reckless adolescence, depicting the Tampa coastline as a debauched paradise of eternal youth and shameless criminality. He crested into adulthood with 2019's The Beach Bum, following a scumbag troubadour (Matthew McConaughey) who should've left the Parrothead party boat a while ago as he gallivants around the Florida Keys.
Now, we come to old age in the strangest episode yet in Korine's Florida saga, his new film Aggro Dr1ft. Except, it isn't exactly a film, and it's not exactly in Florida. Soaked in lurid colors thanks to a couple of sophisticated infrared cameras, Miami — its skyscrapers and causeways, its boats and bayside mansions and slums, even one of the Stiltsville houses — becomes the Broken City, a "tropical dystopia" where gangs and assassins (one played by Travis Scott) do battle with demon lords and guns are as plentiful as big-booty bitches. Except one assassin, BO (Jordi Mollá), is better than the rest, and he lets you know it through incessant, glowering narration about his skills, the family that he protects, and other thuggishly masculine ramblings. Fans of director and screenwriter John Milius ("a real hero of mine," acknowledges the director) will note how closely the world of the Broken City hews to the brutal, lawless realms he conjured in Conan the Barbarian and Apocalypse Now. In fact, the film almost feels like a futuristic Conan, full of brutish warriors and lascivious wenches, of bloodlust and, well, regular lust.

"I always just felt like Florida, but Miami in particular was, I guess it's part of America, but it feels like its own world."

tweet this

Aggro Dr1ft is less of a narrative film than it is a visual experience, a collection of scripted events not unlike cutscenes in video games. Characters move and speak in repetitive ways as if they're going through idle animations. The infrared cinematography gives the actors and props, like BO's Corvette, an artificial quality that makes them resemble computer-generated models. All this is intentional. Korine and his team at the creative studio EDGLRD, which produced the film, were interested in exploring the aesthetics of gaming and how they might be applied to a non-interactive medium like film. The result is something that fuses aspects of both mediums and arguably creates something apart from either.

"We weren't really even setting out to make what I would call traditional film, or we didn't even really know if it was a film. It was kind of an attempt to see what comes after normal, narrative film," Korine says. "My desire is always to create things that are more based on a kind of vibe than a logic. So it really felt like something I hadn't seen or experienced. And then incorporating all the kind of the different elements on top of thermal really was, like, gamifying the whole concept."
Korine and his team at EDGLRD made significant alterations to the infrared footage they shot, incorporating technology such as AI image generation filters and movement-tracking technology. "We basically had the base layer of infrared. And that would always constantly shift depending on where we were shooting, the light, the character's response to heat, the character's physical form. So it would shift, and then in post-production, we would start to integrate, obviously, the VFX and AI into the action, into the layer. So it's a kind of composite."

"What you get out of the cameras is just a map of temperature," says Joao Rosa, a creative director at EDGLRD who worked on VFX for the film. "We realized that that kind of imagery hits the brain very differently from, let's say, normal footage. So from then on, it was really adding layers on top."

That's also how they decided to incorporate AI elements, which Rosa says they mostly programmed themselves. "We weren't using consumer AI tools; we were developing our own. So it was about patching together different protocols like, for example, a facial recognition protocol from a security camera together with a pose estimation. These are things that are not necessarily meant for entertainment or film that we were putting together as a big code that helped us achieve something that's not what you typically see when you talk about AI."

EDGLRD's marketing around Aggro Dr1ft has also been unconventional. The independent company launched the campaign around the film with a Boiler Room rave at El Palenque in Little Havana during Miami Art Week. Korine himself DJed while wearing a mask resembling BO's demon face from the film, flanked by a trio of girls with neon green hair that otherwise resembled Sadako/Samara from The Ring. Swedish rapper Yung Lean and MPC wizard Araabmuzik, who composed the film's menacing score, also provided music, and Boca Raton rapper BLP Kosher also made an appearance at the rave. Korine's art exploits are also tied to the film; his two-part "Aggressive Dr1fter" exhibition series features paintings based on the film.

As for the film itself, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year to mass walkouts, you can see it at a regular movie theater. The film is screening at O Cinema South Beach and dozens of other arthouses across the country. Or you could wait and see if EDGLRD decides to bring it to a strip club, which in some ways, is an ideal setting for such a hyper-stimulating and shamelessly mythically crass piece of media. The company launched the film's theatrical campaign at Crazy Girls in Los Angeles, and Korine hasn't ruled out further screenings at some of Miami's famed cabarets.

"Maybe we'll do it in Tootsies or Booby Trap," he says. "I feel like that would be a great experience."

Aggro Dr1ft. Opens Friday, May 10, at O Cinema South Beach, 1130 Washington Ave., Miami Beach; 786-471-3269; o-cinema.org. Tickets cost $10 to $12.50.