If you know nothing else about Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which screened at the New York Festival on Thursday night just four months after the VHS cameras started to roll, you’ve probably heard it described, either positively or negatively, as “not really a movie.” As Korine himself put it before the screening, “I don’t know what it is. It was made to be more like something that was unearthed, or buried — something that was in a ditch, maybe. Like a VHS tape that was in a ditch. Or an attic. Or a drawer.”

It’s fitting that as Korine rambled, the words that came out of his mouth to define what he made became increasingly intimate in their connotation. In the span of a handful of sentence fragments, Trash Humpers went from something dumped like corpse, to something stored in a home, first hidden away in an attic, and then kept close at hand in a drawer. And this is exactly what Trash Humpers does in practice: in a series of vignettes, videotaped from an insider’s perspective, Korine introduces us to a world of inexplicable horror, and then slowly domesticates it. There may not be an traditional narrative intended, but if you make any effort at all to tie together the threads that Korine has laid out, it would be impossible to not see a beginning, middle and end to this 78 minute artbomb, a progression from dangerous grotesquerie to something more personal and almost — almost — sweet and nice.

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