It’s the end of the world, and everyone is fighting for loot drops. The chorister singing the requiem is , who since has found increasingly kaleidoscopic ways to depict the beauty and horror of a society eating itself. If vaulted his perverse visions into the mainstream bacchanal of red Solo cups and multi-floor EDM ragers, his latest film flips the script for a more isolated age.
, shot entirely in eye-dilating thermal vision, is a nightmare of few words: Miami assassins hunt each other down, praying for an end to the violence as motion-capture demons haunt the skies above them. Cartoonish side characters dispense assignments with the mechanical exaggeration of NPCs. Pole dancers spark firecrackers up and down their bodies while dissolving into a quagmire of robotic A.
I. slush. shows up.
Either you’ll think the whole thing is mind-numbingly tasteless, or you’ll find a sick truth in its garish absurdity. ’s voided-out score is key to the film’s hypebeast ego-death aura. Tapping the Rhode Island producer for a project like this may seem like a throwback—he hasn’t really seen the spotlight since his days sharing festival billings with and (even if his trance-meets-trap 2011 debut, , still sounds as euphoric as ever).
But listening to his music for , it’s hard to fathom that he and Korine didn’t link up sooner. AraabMuzik’s bottle-service transcendence clearly inhabits the same universe as , a molly-fueled fantasy reaching longingly toward the heavens. Rather.