Concord Korine‘s digital IP-focused tech and filmmaking studio EDGLRD, till now, has yielded two options, each directed by Korine himself: The infrared, twisted techno dance social gathering of “Aggro Dr1ft” and the first-person shooter “Child Invasion,” each careening between interminably boring and sickeningly compelling, voyeuristic video video games disguised as motion pictures. However video video games in a way the place the viewer as a substitute has no management, totally in thrall to Korine’s anti-audience imaginative and prescient.
Colombian-American photographer Stillz makes his personal bid at EDGLRD’s intention of redefining the medium together with his function debut, “Barrio Triste,” after a longtime collaboration with Puerto Rican rap star Dangerous Bunny. It’s probably the most narrative-inclined challenge but to emerge from EDGLRD’s secure of button-pushing tasks, and but “Barrio Triste,” which premiered within the Venice Horizons part for cutting-edge filmmakers earlier than heading to TIFF, nonetheless feels extra like a video artwork set up than a film that calls for your consideration in theaters. The sort of challenge — right here, a quasi-found-footage horror film set in Eighties Medellín as town is terrorized by crime and doable aliens — that may play in a behind-the-curtain sidebar at a museum, the place you’d peek in for a couple of minutes earlier than transferring on to a different gallery.
This one is instructed in frantic type, edgeless and uncooked to the nubs, winding its manner by means of lawless Colombian streetways. With an alternatingly serene and jolting, and never-ceasing, rating by Barcelona-based digital musician Arca, “Barrio Triste” is actually a hypnotic expertise — within the sense {that a} hypnotic trance additionally is likely to be meant to lull you to sleep.
Stillz does his personal cinematography and writing (if there’s a screenplay, it seems to have been kidnapped out of the film by aliens), taking pictures on lo-fi-centric video that recollects the bunkest of found-footage horror motion pictures. Whether or not or not the pixellated picture high quality — the place usually what we’re is a complete lot of nothing as soon as a bunch of teenagers steal a broadcast journalist’s digital camera to seize their very own expertise — was a trick of film magic in put up is unclear and, I suppose, irrelevant.
The Eighties setting, given Stillz’s background as a Colombian, isn’t totally inexplicable, because the Gen Z filmmaker works off reminiscences and tales of town that predate him. However what’s lacking, nonetheless on function, is context.
When the movie opens, an on-camera newscaster is relaying details about extraterrestrial lights which might be allegedly falling from the sky in Medellín, into folks’s properties, and with a metallic sound. Then, a marauding pack of teenage thieves assaults him and steals his crew’s digital camera as they head off towards one other heist. A tense jewellery retailer theft, punched up by Arca’s progressively doomy rating that ultimately turns into unbearably clangorous and scary, is orchestrated with vivid realism. However you may want the digital camera would decelerate a bit, or that one of many children working it had extra cinematographic expertise.
However the erosion of a classy visible sensibility or palate is totally the purpose of Stillz’s function debut, and that it’s adjoining to heist or horror or alien motion pictures in any respect makes for probably the most narrative-driven but of EDGLRD’s tasks. Even when that narrative promise seems to be a purple herring for the largely plotless, meandering installments that comply with. A late scene during which the cameraman (let’s name him) scales his manner up the snaking, graffiti-splattered corridors of a slummy condo increase towards its rooftop at evening recollects the climactic basement descent of “The Blair Witch Challenge.” But the payoff on the opposite aspect is much much less chilling, whilst this movie’s swan-song set piece imposes some nifty particular results and supernatural ambiance.
No matter EDGLRD’s system is — and it appears to be one eager on constructing in-house I.P. that may be mined for tasks in different codecs, whether or not VR or precise video video games or for feeding into AI engines — remains to be being mapped out. In “Barrio Triste,” it seems to be occurring in actual time. The interweaving crime-movie and doable alien-abduction threads vining across the empty skeleton at this film’s heart by no means fairly cohere, and on-camera interviews with any variety of the legal teenagers provide no emotional scaffold to seize onto.
There’s magnificence within the ugliness of “Barrio Triste,” however the movie looks like a half-started sentence, a germ of an concept that doesn’t bloom. Extra to return, I’m positive, however Stillz’s film doesn’t justify ready it out.
Grade: C
“Barrio Triste” premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Competition earlier than enjoying TIFF. It’s at present searching for U.S. distribution.
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