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 celebration of “Aggro Dr1ft” and the first-person shooter “Child Invasion,” each careening between interminably boring and sickeningly compelling, voyeuristic video video games disguised as films. However video video games in a way the place the viewer as an alternative has no management, completely 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 along with his characteristic debut, “Barrio Triste,” after a longtime collaboration with Puerto Rican rap star Dangerous Bunny. It’s essentially the most narrative-inclined mission but to emerge from EDGLRD’s steady of button-pushing initiatives, 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 form of mission — right here, a quasi-found-footage horror film set in Eighties Medellín as town is terrorized by crime and doable aliens — that will 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 approach by way of lawless Colombian streetways. With an alternatingly serene and jolting, and never-ceasing, rating by Barcelona-based digital musician Arca, “Barrio Triste” is definitely a hypnotic expertise — within the sense {that a} hypnotic trance additionally may 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), capturing on lo-fi-centric video that recollects the bunkest of found-footage horror films. Whether or not or not the pixellated picture high quality — the place typically what we’re is an entire lot of nothing as soon as a gaggle of teenagers steal a broadcast journalist’s digicam 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 completely inexplicable, because the Gen Z filmmaker works off recollections and tales of town that predate him. However what’s lacking, nonetheless on objective, 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 individuals’s properties, and with a metallic sound. Then, a marauding pack of teenage thieves assaults him and steals his crew’s digicam 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 would possibly want the digicam would decelerate a bit, or that one of many youngsters working it had extra cinematographic expertise.
However the erosion of a complicated visible sensibility or palate is completely the purpose of Stillz’s characteristic debut, and that it’s adjoining to heist or horror or alien films in any respect makes for essentially the most narrative-driven but of EDGLRD’s initiatives. Even when that narrative promise seems to be a pink herring for the largely plotless, meandering installments that observe. A late scene during which the cameraman (let’s name him) scales his approach up the snaking, graffiti-splattered corridors of a slummy residence increase towards its rooftop at evening recollects the climactic basement descent of “The Blair Witch Mission.” But the payoff on the opposite aspect is much much less chilling, at the same time as this movie’s swan-song set piece imposes some nifty particular results and supernatural ambiance.
No matter EDGLRD’s method is — and it appears to be one eager on constructing in-house I.P. that may be mined for initiatives in different codecs, whether or not VR or precise video video games or for feeding into AI engines — continues to be being mapped out. In “Barrio Triste,” it seems to be taking place in actual time. The interweaving crime-movie and doable alien-abduction threads vining across the empty skeleton at this film’s middle by no means fairly cohere, and on-camera interviews with any variety of the prison teenagers supply no emotional scaffold to seize onto.
There’s magnificence within the ugliness of “Barrio Triste,” however the movie appears like a half-started sentence, a germ of an concept that doesn’t bloom. Extra to return, I’m certain, however Stillz’s film doesn’t justify ready it out.
Grade: C
“Barrio Triste” premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Pageant earlier than taking part in TIFF. It’s presently searching for U.S. distribution.
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