#TIFF23 Review: Aggro Dr1ft (Midnight Madness)

By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

The 2023 Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 7th to 17th, more information on tickets and showtimes can be found right here.

Aggro Dr1ft, the latest cinematic provocation from director Harmony Korine, is less a movie and more an experimental (and experiential) film that defies convention or easy categorization. And I’m still not really sure how to rate it as a movie, but I kinda had a great experience? It’s a surreal, trance-like thing that can only really be watched at midnight.

Shot entirely using thermal cameras, Korine’s drug trip, infrared action movie (?) is one of the most WTF did I just watch things ever. The filmmaker developed it by imagining what is “beyond cinema,” wanting to craft a work that doesn’t play off the conventions of linear storytelling, and the result is something more akin to a video game or a sensory experience.

The story loosely follows Bo (Jordi Mollà), a drifter hit man on a dream-like mission through Miami to avenge a demonic nemesis. He has a wife and kids at home who wish he wouldn’t spend so much time on the road, and imparts pseudo-philosophical wisdom to his colleague Zion (played by rapper Travis Scott). And that’s basically it. If the story is decidedly bare-bones in nature, Aggro Dr1ft is all about the hallucinatory, visionary vibes, man.

Watching Korine’s film often feels like something more akin to being at a rave. We get interludes in the pool or at the strip club, showing the heat of scantily clad bodies writhing in deep, thermal neon colours. The whole things plays to an awesome, throbbing soundtrack of techno music by AraabMuzik. The often cheesy dialogue and wildly uneven acting do lead to some unintentional laughs, but the often repetitive, mantra-like line readings also help to put us in a sort of fugue state.

The inherent weirdness of Aggro Dr1ft make it one that will be off-putting to many (animated horn masks occasionally appear over the actor’s faces, and a CGI devil looms in the background of the film’s Florida nightmarescape). But this is one of those movies where whether you think it’s awful or amazing or something else entirely, those are all equally valid opinions. Whether you see it as cool, pretentious, or insufferable trash, all valid. It’s based. It’s post-cinema!

I’m genuinely not sure how it will play outside of special late night screenings, but I had a blast watching it at Midnight Madness, and Korine’s film has all the earmarks of a future cult classic.