‘Baby Invasion’ Review: Harmony Korine’s Mind-Numbing Latest

Iconoclastic auteur Harmony Korine delivers another tripped-out feat of movie gamer madness with Baby Invasion, which follows last year’s AGGRO DR1FT down a similar rabbit hole (one that includes lots of digital rabbits this time) in which violence, mayhem, masks and McMansions come clashing together in the Florida sun.

Whereas DR1FT was a freewheeling assassin flick whose images were processed and reprocessed until they looked like drug-addled nightmares, Invasion applies a different aesthetic but a comparable narrative approach, breaking the barriers between cinema and video games until we no longer know if we’re watching one or the other. And just in case you didn’t get that, onscreen titles come up at some point saying: “This is not a movie. This is a game. This is real life. There is no real life.” All clear now?

Anyone going into Korine’s latest expecting to sit through an adventure story about babies invading Miami Beach should be forewarned: There are no actual babies here, but rather a gang of heavily armed burglars using digital baby masks to disguise themselves. The catch is that they’re playing a video game at the same time, so their real crimes earn them bonus points in the virtual world and cash in the real world.

If that’s still confusing, no worries. Korine couldn’t care less about the viewer getting everything. What’s important is the immersive experience Baby Invasion offers. There are layers upon layers of images: a live-streamed commentary track, CGI bunnies and all kinds of crazy gamer icons, a slew of text in Japanese. The visuals are backed by heavily atmospheric sound design and a heart-rate-accelerating score from British EDM producer Burial.

It’s fascinating to behold for, say, the first 10 minutes, but like DR1FT the film soon becomes numbingly repetitive. It’s one thing to play a video game, which is more or less an active experience, but sitting down and watching one is altogether more passive, and frankly quite boring. That said, millions of people now watch other people playing video games on Twitch or YouTube, so Korine is clearly onto something here.

While there’s no actual script in Baby Invasion, the film can be broken down into three sequences, bookended by an interview with a game designer who explains how her last creation — called either Baby Invasion or Baby Invaders — became a phenomenon IRL. From there, we follow a gang of players, belonging to a larger online group called Duck Mobb, who get locked and loaded with all kinds of assault rifles, then head out in a scary white van to wreak havoc.

The rest of the movie consists of two long home invasion scenes, both set in massive Florida mansions that the invaders gradually turns into billionaire bloodbaths. Not that the action is overtly violent: Lots of guns are wielded but never fired, and the baby-masked robbers spend about as much time scaring homeowners and grabbing their cash as they do galivanting around, taking selfies and eating platters of fresh fruit.

There’s an underlying commentary here about the poor stealing from the ultra-rich, which was already a theme in Korine’s Spring Breakers and becomes much more flagrant this time. The second robbery, which takes place in a whopping mega-mansion replete with indoor basketball court, a colossal outdoor swimming pool (the largest private one in South Florida — I looked it up) and one of the more vulgar interior decorating schemes in recent memory, feels almost justified when you witness the sheer amount of wealth and vanity on display.

Korine takes great pleasure in having his band of merry gamers destroy these spaces, leaving blood-soaked bodies on the ground as they rack up points online. But their fun is not necessarily addictive, and what felt fresh and new at the start does not hold up for the length of a feature. Baby Invasion is ultimately less a game, or a movie, or none or both, than a sort of happening — one that Korine orchestrates with his usual visual flair.

Certain images in the film are downright mesmerizing. But accumulated over 80 minutes, they tend to lose their staying power. Most of Baby Invasion was shot with what look like body cams, offering a fisheye lens-view of the chaos. Other shots are done with home surveillance cameras — which, by the way: Why do none of these Florida billionaires have decent security systems or panic rooms?

There is so much taking place on screen that it’s impossible to catch every detail, not to mention follow a voiceover saying random things like: “The rabbit knew he had been blessed” and “He remembered what it was like to be one with the wind.” Is it all poetry or just a put-on? Again, Baby Invasion is a bit of both, and viewers are likely to either vibe out or tune out.