True, the story may prove skeletal and the character arcs nonexistent, but Korine is primarily concerned with tone here, and love him or hate him, that’s one aspect of filmmaking he excels at. Naturally, logic and reality seem to be in short supply as the girls meet Alien and the mood of the film turns downright ominous, but Korine’s method of contrasting small, honest, and intimate moments against broader, more explicit, and evocative imagery is the key to Spring Breakers’ ability to keep us laughing even as two of the girls go packing and the others trade their fun in the sun for a much darker means of cutting loose. Yet thanks to Gomez, whose nuanced performance subtly pulls Faith’s internal conflict to the surface as she succumbs to the temptation to escape with her friends, Korine confounds our expectations of where the story will lead while simultaneously following his ideas through to their logical conclusions. Of course, that contradiction may prove hard for viewers to process - this is one of those films that straddles the line between satire and sincerity so stealthily that one could see it becoming a staple of sororities if taken at face value - but as Candy, Brit, and Cotty fall for Alien’s malevolent charm, Korine’s warped sensibilities reveal a certain amount of contempt for this youthful rite of passage. Later, a scary run-in with Alien's bitter rival Archie (Gucci Mane) prompts another one of the girls to hightail it back to campus, leaving the remaining two to embrace their dangerous new lifestyle with reckless abandon.įrom the opening shots of topless beach revelers getting blasted with cheap beer as Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites blares on the soundtrack, it’s readily apparent that Korine is mocking the behavior of the typical spring breaker at the same time he’s celebrating it. Rightly sensing danger from the self-professed “gangster with a heart of gold,” Faith boards a bus bound for school as her three friends fall into a dangerous cycle of drugs and depravity. That is, until wild-eyed, cornrowed drug dealer Alien (James Franco) inexplicably posts their bail. But when the girls are thrown in jail following a police raid on a beachfront hotel room, it looks like the party is over. Left broke and alone on campus as their classmates head to Florida for some fun in the sun, coeds Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine) steal a car, rob a local diner, and head south with their devoutly religious girlfriend Faith (Selena Gomez) in tow.
While it may be a bit of a stretch to claim that Korine’s vision as a filmmaker has “matured” given the amount of debauchery on display here, his grotesque caricature of youth pop culture appears to come from a more studied and controlled place than, say, Trash Humpers, but without sacrificing the discomforting undercurrent of danger that runs through many of his movies. Harmony Korine combines leering exploitation with pitch-black satire in Spring Breakers, an audacious, sun-kissed nightmare that folds the director’s familiar flair for the surreal into a narrative framework that results in his most coherent (and accessible) picture to date.