Korg Funk 5: Nadia Lee Cohen’s Surreal Raid on the Male Gaze

Alexandra Patterson

The catapulted middle finger in a moment of defiance. Credit: Still from Korg Funk 5 (dir. Nadia Lee Cohen and Charlie Denis, 2025)

“He’s behind you!”  Clowns, cowboys, and an AI uprising- Nadia Lee Cohen and Charlie Denis stage their own surrealist pantomime, pulling us into a delirious spectacle. Their short film takes Aphex Twin’s 2017 track Korg Funk 5, a collaboration between Richard D. James and the Japanese synth powerhouse Korg and reimagines it as a fever dream of modern America. At the centre is Cohen herself, transformed into a robotic showgirl in a glistening electric-blue leotard, dancing and orchestrating the chaos with balletic precision. The twitching, electric soundtrack drives the three-minute-fifty-second video, which unfolds like an elastic dream.

The video begins with a boy in braces, flashing a dollar bill. On the note, George Washington’s head is a clown. We are in a warped vision of the American dream: uncanny, ludicrous, and tinged with menace. The sequence follows; Cohen dances in a studio, an old woman makes a gun with her fingers. Bang, Cohen is shot, blood seeping. But do not be fooled, this robotic showgirl refuses annihilation. What follows is retro kitsch warped into nightmare. A touch of Dirty Dancing collides with Lynchian terror. Her face melts and reforms, robotic and indeterminate. She runs through liminal hallways, leaps onto cars, pole-dances, lies in the street under the glare of the paparazzi’s flash. The showgirl becomes a villanelle of death and rebirth: each time she falls, her outline chalked on the floor, she rises again. L’absurde!

Cohen and Denis breathe new life into surrealism, a movement born from the chaos and trauma of the First World War. One cannot help but draw parallels with Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 French surrealist film produced and edited by Luis Bruñel and co-written with Salvador Dali. Like Korg Funk 5, it eschewed traditional narrative using dream logic and free association to present seemingly unrelated, often disturbing scenes- a razor slicing perilously across an eye, and a man in a nun’s habit cycling down a street. Both revel in absurdity and shock, holding a mirror to their cultural anxieties.

Clownish arbitrators of authority. Credit: Still from Korg Funk 5 (dir. Nadia Lee Cohen and Charlie Denis, 2025)

Yet, here is where Cohen decisively diverges. In Un Chien Andalou, women appear as passive victims of male desire and violence. Cohen raids this grubby male gaze, turning the surrealist stage into a delirious feminist pantomime. Her robotic showgirl reclaims the female body, wielding it as a site of resilience and empowerment rather than exploitation. She commands the gaze rather than succumbing to it. This feminist pivot reframes the dream logic itself as what once reflected male fantasies now channels contemporary fears of AI, gendered violence, and societal control.

André Breton, head of the Surrealist movement, once said: “What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only the real,”. Cohen and Denis channel this very ethos but bend it to feminist ends. Law and order are reduced to a boy and a clown- arbiters of chaos- while men are rendered absurd buffoons in a carnival of spectacularly ridiculous excess. Nuns hammer keyboards and form a band, Cohen is photographed in exposing ways, pole dances, and is even set on fire. It is utter grotesquerie!

The result is both dazzling and macabre, a performance that unsettles even as it delights. The film feels like a Freudian dream of contemporary society, teeming with hidden fears and secret desires. It reflects the untrustworthy nature of authority, and the very real anxieties women face in a world where safety is never guaranteed. We explore the scenes like a sweaty dream, sometimes seeing it through her eyes, sometimes through the lens of those in pursuit. The directors reach into our subconscious, unearthing anxieties that feel all too real. Some moments flirt with the obvious- the dollar bills, the clown-police, even the catapulted middle finger- yet in Cohen’s world of excess, these clichés become part of the dark joke.

For the finale, the robotic Cohen has multiplied. Fireworks erupt in celebration, echoes of the Fourth of July suspended in the air, as if she herself has declared her independence. Her villanelle has triumphed. Hooray! Yet the question lingers: what fate awaits this AI showgirl once the pink curtains fall?

Rising from her own chalk outline as death, performance, and rebirth collapse into one. Credit: Still from Korg Funk 5 (dir. Nadia Lee Cohen and Charlie Denis, 2025)

The world that the film conjures is far enough from reality to feel utterly surreal, yet close enough to be chillingly possible. As Breton wrote: ‘There are fairy stories to be written for adults’, reminding us of the power of transforming the fantastical into a lens for truth. Just as Surrealists once transformed terror into absurdity, Cohen and Denis provide us with a slice of what surrealism looks like in our age. Their vision is dazzling and grotesque, defiantly feminist and doubtless prophetic of the increasingly fractured world we are destined to inhabit. In the darkest of times, it is to our dreams we go.

Voilà, le chaos!