{"id":150209,"date":"2025-09-12T00:40:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T00:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150209\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T00:40:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T00:40:11","slug":"stillz-teams-with-harmony-korines-edglrd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150209\/","title":{"rendered":"Stillz Teams with Harmony Korine’s Edglrd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Harmony Korine<\/a>\u2018s digital IP-focused tech and filmmaking studio EDGLRD<\/a>, until now, has yielded two features, both directed by Korine himself: The infrared, twisted techno dance party of \u201cAggro Dr1ft<\/a>\u201d and the first-person shooter \u201cBaby Invasion<\/a>,\u201d both careening between interminably boring and sickeningly compelling, voyeuristic video games disguised as movies. But video games in a sense where the viewer instead has no control, entirely in thrall to Korine\u2019s anti-audience vision.<\/p>\n

Colombian-American photographer Stillz<\/a> makes his own bid at EDGLRD\u2019s aim of redefining the medium with his feature debut, \u201cBarrio Triste<\/a>,\u201d after a longtime collaboration with Puerto Rican rap star Bad Bunny. It\u2019s the most narrative-inclined project yet to emerge from EDGLRD\u2019s stable of button-pushing projects, and yet \u201cBarrio Triste,\u201d which premiered in the Venice<\/a> Horizons section for cutting-edge filmmakers before heading to TIFF<\/a>, still feels more like a video art installation than a movie that demands your attention in theaters. The kind of project \u2014 here, a quasi-found-footage horror movie set in 1980s Medell\u00edn as the city is terrorized by crime and possible extraterrestrial beings \u2014 that would play in a behind-the-curtain sidebar at a museum, where you\u2019d peek in for a few minutes before moving on to another gallery.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a> \"'Dreams<\/a> <\/p>\n

This one is told in frantic style, edgeless and raw to the nubs, winding its way through lawless Colombian streetways. With an alternatingly serene and jolting, and never-ceasing, score by Barcelona-based electronic musician Arca, \u201cBarrio Triste\u201d is certainly a hypnotic experience \u2014 in the sense that a hypnotic trance also might be intended to lull you to sleep. <\/p>\n

Stillz does his own cinematography and writing (if there is a screenplay, it appears to have been abducted out of the movie by aliens), shooting on lo-fi-centric video that recalls the bunkest of found-footage horror movies. Whether or not the pixellated image quality \u2014 where often what we are looking at is a whole lot of nothing once a group of teens steal a broadcast journalist\u2019s camera to capture their own experience \u2014 was a trick of movie magic in post is unclear and, I suppose, irrelevant.<\/p>\n

The 1980s setting, given Stillz\u2019s background as a Colombian, isn\u2019t entirely inexplicable, as the Gen Z filmmaker works off memories and stories of the city that predate him. But what\u2019s missing, however on purpose, is context.<\/p>\n

When the film<\/a> opens, an on-camera newscaster is relaying information about extraterrestrial lights that are allegedly falling from the sky in Medell\u00edn, into people\u2019s homes, and with a metallic sound. Then, a marauding pack of teenage thieves attacks him and steals his crew\u2019s camera as they head off toward another heist. A tense jewelry store robbery, punched up by Arca\u2019s progressively doomy score that eventually becomes unbearably clangorous and scary, is orchestrated with vivid realism. But you might wish the camera would slow down a bit, or that one of the kids operating it had more cinematographic experience.<\/p>\n

But the erosion of a sophisticated visual sensibility or palate is entirely the point of Stillz\u2019s feature debut, and that it\u2019s adjacent to heist or horror or alien movies at all makes for the most narrative-driven yet of EDGLRD\u2019s projects. Even if that narrative promise turns out to be a red herring for the largely plotless, meandering installments that follow. A late scene in which the cameraman (let\u2019s call him) scales his way up the snaking, graffiti-splattered corridors of a slummy apartment building up toward its rooftop at night recalls the climactic basement descent of \u201cThe Blair Witch Project.\u201d Yet the payoff on the other side is far less chilling due to a lack of emotional current, even as this film\u2019s swan-song set piece imposes some nifty special effects and supernatural atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Whatever EDGLRD\u2019s formula is \u2014 and it seems to be one keen on building in-house I.P. that can be mined for projects in other formats, whether VR or actual video games or for feeding into AI engines \u2014 is still being mapped out. In \u201cBarrio Triste,\u201d it appears to be happening in real time. The interweaving crime-movie and possible alien-abduction threads vining around the empty skeleton at this movie\u2019s center never quite cohere, and on-camera interviews with any number of the criminal teens offer no emotional scaffold to grab onto. <\/p>\n

There is beauty in the ugliness of \u201cBarrio Triste,\u201d but the film feels like a half-started sentence, a germ of an idea that doesn\u2019t bloom. More to come, I\u2019m sure, but Stillz\u2019s movie doesn\u2019t justify waiting it out.<\/p>\n

Grade: C<\/p>\n

\u201cBarrio Triste\u201d premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival before playing TIFF. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Harmony Korine\u2018s digital IP-focused tech and filmmaking studio EDGLRD, until now, has yielded two features, both directed by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[92670,92671,88,2695,206,900,92672,46686,15741],"class_list":["post-150209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-barrio-triste","tag-edglrd","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-stillz","tag-tiff","tag-venice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}