Spring Breakers was the first significant feature film released by A24, the independent film production company that has become one of the most influential forces in film, founded by three veterans of a multinational investment bank. One of its signatures is the use of drifting pastel interstitials present here and in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, one of the studio’s two Best Picture winners. But in Korine’s film, the colors do not just represent lushness, life, regeneration—they bleed continuously into cold, sober mornings after. About a half hour into Spring Breakers, the girls are at a cliché-riddled motel party (foam, cocaine, keg stands) soundtracked by Birdy Nam Nam’s “Goin’ In (Skrillex “Goin’ Down” Mix)”—which would soon become the scaffolding for A$AP Rocky’s “Wild for the Night”—when the police drag them, along with many other partygoers, to jail. The teal glow that suffuses lockup is indistinguishable from the pool where Faith decides that her life has never been so perfect.
