Bo (Jordi Mollà) in Aggro Dr1ft (Film at Lincoln Center)

Judging from interviews and Q&As director Harmony Korine has given for his latest feature Aggro Dr1ft, he would prefer that you not call this trippy, phantasmagoric, thermal imaging-camera lensed, Miami-set assassin tale a movie. Instead, in Korine’s words, this work represents “what comes after movies.” He has also expressed his boredom and dissatisfaction with “normal” movies. Presumably he means conventional narratives. Aggro Dr1ft’s eye-blistering infrared imagery; its magenta, crimson, yellow, and pink neon-like colors; and its computerized palette, all suggest an episode of Miami Vice filtered through a psychedelic, acid-soaked consciousness. Korine has certainly succeeded at creating something other than a conventional film. Whether all this results in great, or even interesting, art is another question.

Aggro Dr1ft’s extremely thin storyline—Korine worked without a screenplay—centers on Bo (Jordi Mollà), who, in a monotone stream-of-consciousness voice-over that runs throughout, refers to himself as “the best assassin in the world.” At other points, he intones, “I am a solitary hero” and “The old world is no more.” Bo, nevertheless, hopes to exit his profession and devote more time to his wife and kids (who apparently have no idea what he does for a living), leading to the cliché of having to do one last job before he can get out completely. Periodically, a giant horned demon appears as Bo goes about his killings, seeming to represent his troubled conscience about the actions he performs on the job.

Bo’s final target for assassination, a muscular gang boss (Joshua Tilley), sprouts angel wings, stomps around energetically humping the air, and bellows “Dance, bitches!” at a bevy of female twerkers surrounding him. Here, it must be noted that the depiction of women—the only ones we see, including Bo’s wife, are all strippers, twerkers, or both at once—is as retrograde as the visuals are forward-thinking. At some point, rapper Travis Scott shows up as Zion, Bo’s protégé who will presumably replace Bo when he retires. Also, a group of machete-wielding little people are added to the mix, all of this culminating in a predictably violent conclusion that curiously utilizes knives and machetes rather than guns.

Aggro Dr1ft is the first release from Korine’s new production company/multimedia artistic collective EDGLRD—make of that moniker what you will. Korine describes this film’s aesthetic (as well as his company’s future projects) as “gamecore,” which makes sense since the visuals most immediately evoke video games, especially violent, hedonistic ones such as Grand Theft Auto. The film reportedly involved a year of post-production work, with extensive VFX imagery to enhance and transform the footage, giving each character shifting patterns of imagery that seem to come from under the skin. AI was also employed. Korine, however, is vague about how exactly it was used in creating the images. The result of all this CGI work is that Aggro Dr1ft exists in an uncanny valley between animation and live action, leaving the viewer unsettled throughout.

Although one can philosophically admire Korine’s attempt to create an alternative to conventional cinema, the final result leaves much to be desired. The initial visual novelty wears off very quickly, and the rest of the work becomes maddeningly repetitious, like a video game stuck in its first level. The banality of the hit man non-plot and the loud generic EDM of AraabMuzik’s score don’t help matters, making the viewing a sometimes punishing and irritating experience.

As much as Korine leans on bleeding-edge technology here, his much more lo-fi earlier movies Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy, and Trash Humpers (whose grainy VHS imagery represents the exact visual opposite of his new film), as well as his unusual collaboration with Hollywood stars—Selena Gomez, James Franco (Spring Breakers), and Matthew McConaughey (The Beach Bum)—felt much more subversive and disruptive of “normal” cinema tropes than anything in Aggro Dr1ft. If this is what comes after movies, then for me it’s a hard pass. Let’s hope that movies are here to stay.