First-person films are on the rise – is it a gimmick, or something more?

Harmony Korine has released the trailer for Baby Invasion, the feature-length follow-up to 2024’s Aggro Dr1ft. The new film revolves around an ultra-realistic video game, featuring a gang of mercenaries with AI-powered baby face avatars who target the rich and powerful. “As players navigate this dark web-leaked game,” the description reads, “the boundaries between the digital and the real world blur.” In the trailer, we see characters pick out assault rifles in a room filled with cutecore cushions (so far, so Harmony Korine) before plunging into a string of violent home invasions, warped by AI, gamified via health bars and collectable coins, and accompanied by a frenetic Burial soundtrack.

For some viewers, however, the most jarring part of the film might be its ‘player one’ perspective, which briefly made an appearance in Aggro Dr1ft as well. True to the FPS (first-person shooter) genre, viewers witness the action from inside the skull of one of the film’s baby-faced protagonists. In one clip, we see ‘our’ hands shoving cash into a rucksack. In another ‘we’ help hold a group of people hostage. In a third, ‘we’ appear to livestream ourselves on the toilet.

Baby Invasion isn’t the first film to feature a first-person perspective in the last year, though – in fact, there’s been a wave of feature-length movies that have adopted the unconventional perspective. Take the award-winning Nickel Boys, for example, which follows protagonists Elwood Curtis and Turner through their time at a racist, abusive reform school in 1960s Florida. Directed by RaMell Ross, from Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name, the film commits to long takes from a first-person perspective for almost its entire runtime. According to Ross himself, the idea came immediately after reading the book, as a way to emphasise the boys’ point-of-view on the horrors they endured.

Speaking of horror, two literal horror films released in 2024 committed (more or less) to a first-person perspective. In Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, which hit cinemas earlier this year after its Sundance premiere, the viewer sees through the eyes of a ghost that’s trapped inside a haunted house. Well... the ghost itself is doing the haunting, but we only get to see that through the startled reactions of the house’s new inhabitants, the Payne family, who have plenty of their own problems to work through.

Then, there’s In a Violent Nature. This Canadian slasher film, which debuted at Sundance in 2024, basically does what it says on the tin: we follow a mute, undead murderer as he goes on a grisly rampage, shredding his way through a group of unlucky teens. Obviously, the plot itself isn’t particularly groundbreaking, but the POV is a different story – from an over-the-shoulder perspective (so not quite first-person) the audience is taken on a ride from the killer’s perspective, offering an uncomfortable proximity to the scenes of brutal violence, as well as some moments of downtime that have seen it compared to the Slow Cinema movement.

None of these films are totally revolutionary in their first-person POV, of course. In 2015, a sci-fi film titled Hardcore Henry induced nausea in some viewers after one-and-a-half hours of action through the eyes of its main character. Others wrote the camerawork off as a gimmick, and it was widely considered a box office bomb. Before that, there was also an ill-fated DOOM adaptation (2005) with first-person sections, while The Blair Witch Project (1999) kind of gave us a first-person experience as a pioneer of the ‘found footage’ genre.

One difference is that films like Nickel Boys and Presence commit to their POV for the whole runtime, and go to great lengths to actually make it feel real. As Ross tells the Verge, filming Nickel Boys involved finding a whole new sense of timing and choreography: “If you are late to something and then you find it… then it just fundamentally feels more like human vision.” The other big difference? The reception. All received positive reviews from critics on top of their commercial success.

Why is the tide changing toward first-person cinema today? It’s tempting to suggest it has something to do with the emergence of video games as a dominant cultural form. Gaming has increased rapidly with each generation over the last few decades, with 85 per cent of 16-24-year-olds calling themselves gamers in 2024. When they’re not gaming, millions of users also log on to streaming sites like Twitch, to watch other people game. So it makes sense that younger audiences might be more accustomed to the first-person view that’s so widespread across the industry. 

On the other hand, it could be seen to map onto the epidemic of narcissism – or “Main Character Syndrome” – that supposedly plagues modern life. Is it only possible for today’s viewers to really enjoy a film if they can see themselves not just reflected in, but actually as, the protagonist? As a form of ironic cultural commentary, this would make sense for Harmony Korine, whose last film undeniably tapped into the selfish, ‘lone wolf’ vibes of contemporary internet culture. But writing off the recent wave of first-person films as a capitulation to self-obsessed audiences doesn’t quite tell the full story.

If a slasher like In a Violent Nature aims to put you in the shoes of a murderous psychopath, then Nickel Boys does the exact opposite. In the intimacy of shared sight, moments of beauty and friendship are heightened, but so are the horrors, as the viewer is forced to witness everything Elwood and Turner do – the beatings, the bullying, and the tense uncertainty of their final escape. As Doreen St. Félix writes in the New Yorker: “Ross creates a first-person world of closeups, fadeouts, visual ellipses, and other motifs that sometimes orient us and other times alienate us.” Far from an audience ego trip, it’s an exercise in empathy. It enables most viewers to experience a situation far more extreme, violent, and unjust than they’re (hopefully) used to.

But who’s to say that dishing out violence in first-person – rather than receiving it – can’t achieve a similar effect? For a while now, FPS games like Call of Duty have questioned the ethics of the missions that players are forced to complete if they want to progress (while still serving as thinly-veiled propaganda for the military-industrial complex). Similarly, first-person films like Baby Invasion might raise some uncomfortable questions, amid all the bloodshed and sparkly graphics. Like: how would it feel to be the kind of person who could enact this kind of violence? What kind of world might produce a person like that? Even so, will some viewers simply want to revel in the spectacle of blowing someone’s head off? Yes, that too.