Terrence Malick From Hell

Harmony Korine’s latest film, Aggro Dr1ft, which I was privileged to watch before its release, is mesmerizing. I think it’s the most special of all his works and marks a new chapter in his oeuvre.

When the film began, I thought something must be wrong with the projector. Why are all colors inverted? Ten minutes passed by, and the color scheme remained the same, negative and hallucinatory. At first, I felt frustrated and lost, but as things progressed, cinema took over.

For cinephiles, the film’s color scheme has parallels with the highly experimental films of Stan Brakhage—in which colors are inverted—and, of course, with the legendary 2001: A Space Odyssey sequence “Beyond the Infinite.” There’s also a subtle similarity to Richard Linklater’s film, A Scanner Darkly, which used special rotoscoping and digital painting to create a surreal effect. And, for more recent comparison, it recalls the infrared sequences in The Zone of Interest of the little girl covertly planting food for the Auschwitz inmates.

Aggro Dr1ft follows a hit man named Bo (Jordi Mollà) in a postapocalyptic Florida, who is torn between family and duty as he hunts down a crime lord. The fingerprints of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are all over the allegorical postapocalypse. However, something that seems to have been overlooked by critics and media is the more religious references in Korine’s latest work.

Although Korine’s films have been accused of being nihilistic and soulless—an accusation I object to—few people seem to draw a connection between Korine’s Jewish roots and his work. There are recurring bits of voice-over and visual motifs that seem to reference the intertestamental messianic books (ancient mystical books that speak of the “end times” and didn’t make it into the biblical canon), such as The War between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness and the final war of Gog and Magog. The hit man in the film has a conversation with Zion (Travis Scott) at one point (I’m paraphrasing): “There must be something out there, watching over us … your mother.” During this philosophical debate, Zion replies, “All I know is work, go to bed, work, go to bed.” In that very scene, the colors turn into a rainbowlike scheme, which seems to reference the mystical ideas of the Zohar, which discusses the colors of the rainbow and how they represent the different attributes of God.

The hit man’s wife appears a few times, moaning and imploring her husband to come home. The wife seems to symbolize the “good spirit,” and the call of bloodshed “the evil spirit,” who causes man to sin and emerges on a few occasions, towering over the protagonist in awe-inspiring imagery.

The “crime lord” with black wings appearing throughout the film is evil incarnate, fueling all the other manifestations of cruelty. However, as in ancient mysticism, there are two layers: the shell, the external layer, which in Dr1ft is the hit man killing the bad men, and the mirroring internal layer of the heavenly wars between celestial entities—an idea also found in various Jewish mystical sources. At the end of the film, the monstrous character is beheaded, similar to the Psalms and the tradition that in messianic times the “serpent” will be slain (the serpent in ancient mysticism is synonymous with the “evil inclination” since the archetypal story of temptation is found in the tale of the serpent and Eve). This beheading of “evil” seems to allow the hit man to return home and to love his family.

When I reached out to Mr. Korine, asking him about his Jewish influences, he responded in his typical “Warhol gone mad” fashion: “Wow, this is lit. True dat, man.” Korine, who gained notoriety as a youngster on late-night TV for his performance art shenanigans, still likes to deflect questions about his work through comedy. In doing so, he follows in the tradition of many great filmmakers and other artists who refuse to interpret their work publicly, including David Lynch and Terrence Malick. They prefer the work to speak for itself.

Terrence Malick is famous not only for his unique poetic form but also for his religious themes. His films are full of references to God, from his war movie The Thin Red Line to his anti-hedonistic Knight of Cups and his magnum opus The Tree of Life, juxtaposing a family in a small town in the ’50s and the creation of the universe. All his films are searching for the divine. “If you are unhappy, you shouldn’t take it as God’s disfavor. Just the contrary. Might be the very sign He loves you. He shows His love not by helping avoid suffering, but by sending you suffering, by keeping you there,” declares Armin Mueller-Stahl in Knight of Cups. “Maybe all men got one big soul,” ponders Jim Caviezel in The Thin Red Line. “I didn’t see the glory,” murmurs the father played by Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life. Malick mines the more relatable elements of religion and presents them in a digestible way so that people of all backgrounds can still appreciate his perspective. His religious worldview is one of hope, both in the mantra-like, whispery voice-over and in the camera sweeping over golden pastures and diving into blue oceans.

There’s a certain Malickian quality to Korine’s films. Like The Thin Red Line, Dr1ft is like “an endless picture,” with no beginning or end. Scenes jump through time and space, untethered from the linearity of time. The dialogue feels distant and vague, and we’re only allowed to hear snippets of philosophical banter. Poetic voice-over is sprinkled throughout the film, along with erratic jump cuts. Aggro Dr1ft is anti-intellectual, preoccupied more with the atmosphere of this Floridian Philip K. Dick cyberpunk fever dream than the plot. It’s “visual music,” a kind of filmmaking to which the early masters alluded. Even the dialogue and narration are mere instruments for the sake of the cinematic symphony.

Funnily enough, it was announced not too long ago that Malick had written a script and wanted Korine to direct, something that the reclusive director has never asked of any other filmmaker. This reinforces my hypothesis that Korine imbues his films with a certain spirituality similar to Malick.

While Malick’s vision of the world is draped in golden hour and angelic whispering women, innocent children, and flocks of birds, Korine’s is draped in purple dystopian skies, red oceans, black-tinged blood, and rainbow-colored strippers. Korine searches for God in a world that’s overwhelmingly hellish, eventually finding the divine in “love,” as the main character narrates: “All that matters is love”—a theme found in Malickian cinema. As the mother breathes in The Tree of Life, “If you do not love, your life will flash by.”

Both filmmakers are searching for the same thing, albeit in different worlds. One heaven, one hell. We can only conclude that Harmony Korine is indeed Terrence Malick from hell.