Harmony Korine‘s digital IP-focused tech and filmmaking studio EDGLRD, until now, has yielded two features, both directed by Korine himself: The infrared, twisted techno dance party of “Aggro Dr1ft” and the first-person shooter “Baby Invasion,” 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’s anti-audience vision.
Colombian-American photographer Stillz makes his own bid at EDGLRD’s aim of redefining the medium with his feature debut, “Barrio Triste,” after a longtime collaboration with Puerto Rican rap star Bad Bunny. It’s the most narrative-inclined project yet to emerge from EDGLRD’s stable of button-pushing projects, and yet “Barrio Triste,” which premiered in the Venice Horizons section for cutting-edge filmmakers before heading to TIFF, still feels more like a video art installation than a movie that demands your attention in theaters. The kind of project — here, a quasi-found-footage horror movie set in 1980s Medellín as the city is terrorized by crime and possible extraterrestrial beings — that would play in a behind-the-curtain sidebar at a museum, where you’d peek in for a few minutes before moving on to another gallery.
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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, “Barrio Triste” is certainly a hypnotic experience — in the sense that a hypnotic trance also might be intended to lull you to sleep.
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 — where often what we are looking at is a whole lot of nothing once a group of teens steal a broadcast journalist’s camera to capture their own experience — was a trick of movie magic in post is unclear and, I suppose, irrelevant.
The 1980s setting, given Stillz’s background as a Colombian, isn’t entirely inexplicable, as the Gen Z filmmaker works off memories and stories of the city that predate him. But what’s missing, however on purpose, is context.
When the film opens, an on-camera newscaster is relaying information about extraterrestrial lights that are allegedly falling from the sky in Medellín, into people’s homes, and with a metallic sound. Then, a marauding pack of teenage thieves attacks him and steals his crew’s camera as they head off toward another heist. A tense jewelry store robbery, punched up by Arca’s 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.
But the erosion of a sophisticated visual sensibility or palate is entirely the point of Stillz’s feature debut, and that it’s adjacent to heist or horror or alien movies at all makes for the most narrative-driven yet of EDGLRD’s 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’s 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 “The Blair Witch Project.” Yet the payoff on the other side is far less chilling, even as this film’s swan-song set piece imposes some nifty special effects and supernatural atmosphere.
Whatever EDGLRD’s formula is — 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 — is still being mapped out. In “Barrio Triste,” 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’s center never quite cohere, and on-camera interviews with any number of the criminal teens offer no emotional scaffold to grab onto.
There is beauty in the ugliness of “Barrio Triste,” but the film feels like a half-started sentence, a germ of an idea that doesn’t bloom. More to come, I’m sure, but Stillz’s movie doesn’t justify waiting it out.
Grade: C
“Barrio Triste” premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival before playing TIFF. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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