Provocateur and filmmaker Harmony Korine’s new film, Aggro Dr1ft, the most high profile film of this year’s TIFF Midnight Madness screening, is simultaneously the festival’s biggest letdown. An obvious pastiche of hypermasculine genre films a la Nicolas Winding Refn, Korine has the visual element down but does not grasp what makes films like Refn’s so enjoyable. You can be as much of a minimalist as you want, but there has to be something to offer - something articulate. Aggro Dr1ft has little to offer but its infrared cinematography gimmick. Korine claims to have made the film to recreate a psychedelic experience but forgot that psychedelic experiences are supposed to be fun for those taking them. Admittedly, walking out with the dozen or so other screening attendees in the dress circle crossed my mind more times than I can count.

It’s a shame because before the film started at its Midnight Madness premiere, the energy in the room was pure electricity. The audience was invigorated to a degree I rarely see - a fervor usually reserved for midnight screenings of beloved classics instead of new films. The audience was so energetic that they even cheered for the seizure warning preceding the film, just to have some release for their enthusiasm. But not even twenty minutes into the film, the energy of this once-lively crowd had fizzled out like an Alka-seltzer that was left out for too long.

Whenever you think something interesting is about to happen, the film cuts back to the same repetitive nonsense that it was doing five minutes ago. At one point in the film, the crowd energetically cheered at a moment when it seemed like something would happen, but then nothing happened. The CGI in the movie is laughably bad, with the special effects looking more like Snapchat filters than anything else. Despite a fantastic and thundering score from producer AraabMuzik, it still can’t save the film from being annoyingly platitudinous.

The screenplay, where the film's credits did not have a writer listed, feels like it was AI-generated. Hollow words about love and violence are repeated ad nauseam, and you can’t help but think about how eighty minutes can feel so excruciatingly long. The entire film is about the protagonist, BO (whose name is said about once or twice), spouting empty platitudes; the dialog is more like drunken stammering than anything concrete. Nothing is said, nothing is learned, and nothing is enjoyable. I know the script is supposed to be secondary to the audiovisual experience, but it is so atrociously written that it is impossible to ignore. The film is more or less a vague concept illustrated by an hour and a half of frivolous nonsense.

Korine’s shots linger twice as long as they should, some shots are reused (in an eighty-minute movie), and women are objectified to a ridiculous degree. I understand that Korine is intentionally satirizing male-gaze cinema, but to do something and label it “satire” isn’t enough. Good satire isn’t just an interesting concept; something of substance must be made from the concept. To call the film a “nothing burger” implies that there is something to bite into.

After an already terrible viewing experience, Korine confessed to using AI technology, which left an incredibly bitter taste in my mouth given the current state of the film industry. Inspired by video games like Grand Theft Auto, Korine’s self-proclaimed “game-core” film forgets that video games are usually enjoyable, engaging, and exciting. In a sense, the film is like Grand Theft Auto, but if the player never played the game’s main story and only visited the virtual strip clubs.

This is the core flaw with Aggro Dr1ft: it is a painfully uninteresting movie where absolutely nothing of substance happens until the last ten eye-rolling minutes. Either the greatest practical joke in recent cinema history or one of the worst movies of the year, Aggro Dr1ft is flat-out boring, proving that a good concept can only take an artist so far. The fact that Harmony Korine managed to sneak this into film festivals is like a cinematic Trojan Horse, but even that is too high of a compliment because at least the Trojan Horse can be considered “art.”