This is the advertising maxim that arms Divinity throughout and is the plate on which it’s served: Modern Life Has Become Fatalistically Obsessed With Itself.
Set deep in the glistening, eerie hills of an unnamed American desert, Divinity is a film that feels so new and oblique, it feels weird to contemplate. Focusing on the story of two celestial brothers that arrive on Earth to kidnap and punish Jaxxon (a jittering, pissed off Stephen Dorff), the creator and researcher of Divinity: A product that enhances life to the point of immortality. To add to the rotating ethical quandries floating around his great research mansion – a neo-brutalist cave shaped like an isopod – is call girl Nikita with a perhaps seraphic fertility and Jaxxon’s turbo-shredded brother Rip, the face of the product.
Already, as I’m describing this to you, it feels like I’m straightening it too much. Rigidity doesn’t exist here.
Divinity’s world is one, twice removed and three steps in front of our future, but it feels there to goad us into copying its shape. An experimental mood-piece world where every advert is entirely sexualizing things like cereal, or selling you sex wholesale. A pulsing, horny, body-obsessed grotesquerie that wants you to have sex in front of the TV before you purchase. Chemical betterment to to a completely othered mass audience. A world where heavenly stars become inquisitors of Man, and reproduction is caged in a near-new-age etherea cult whose harem exist as apparitions in the opaque. Perfect beings that live in a chrysalis of purity. Of course, the story is told in the desert, the great Mecca for drug adventurism and cult retreat. Cities are so jejune when the glittering stars above aren’t able to locate the darknesses in Man’s heart as it commodifies aging (or lack thereof). Divinity the product is treated as a ubiquitous brand name, both accessible but luxurious. Free samples if you buy Laundry Detergent, and concentrated small-batch fineries for the wealthy. A decadence for every home, but a decadence nonetheless. To see characters defy the tides of time with the elixir, after we see a biblically-accurate angel in static in the opening minute, feels like we truly misunderstand aging. We are the crumbling visage of the universe and our beauty is returning to it.
The film exercises a dark looseness. It shakes its legs, stretches, curls an iron but it never feels that it has to deliver itself as a solid piece. There are small segments of lust philosophy, in which Nikita explains sex and desire to the brothers, set to a shimmering soundtrack. A great, utterly indulgent aural segment that lets us breathe in the dust rather than ingest it. There are biblical allusions to the brothers, especially in terms of their father’s work, how he passed and its effect on them. We’re given heady notes on medical research that considers human life and its origins as fertile grounds for moral manipulation, if you can bend your light around the FDA and highground naysayers. The sludging masses, reflective of Opioid crisis, Social Media influencers, the ’80s-body-obsessed-carryover and chemical abduction of the soul take hold on your attention throughout. A close cousin to Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond The Black Rainbow, but less evasive in its abstractions. Even in amongst this, there are stopmotion fights, depictions of heaven, souls escaping the body, muscle-bound butlers in shock collars and small sections featuring Scott Bakula. It’s all messy and curious but it never feels like we’re being lectured. It’s a fluid, experimental sci-fi body-horror that focuses on sharpening its body as a blade, not particularly its mind.
Speaking of which, Divinity is truly one of the great looking and sounding modern sci-fis. I can’t remember anything more stark and evocative in an age. High-grain monochrome Eraserhead-like 16mm film stock that’s been pushed with cheap developer. Something closer to a perfume advert for nightmares over anything else. Whirring, chittering primitive technology, robust in its texturing with a CRT TV tube softness and heavy keyboard shunking. Lots of oscilloscope scanlines raking across the screen. A true, monolithic colour grading that makes the stars look like glittering acne in the night sky and creates grey-blushed dusks. Such brutal textures making everything formulate forthwith from shadows like it’s unsticking itself from glue. The desert transforms at times into a dreamy coal beach, the score itself resting on the extremities of waveforms. Sometimes it sounds like shimmering alien-fires that lift you from within, and at times it turns into frightening industrial technique, overpowering your engine and threatening to turn you into metal. Dean Hurley, frequent David Lynch collaborator, and DJ Muggs, Cypress Hill producer (yes, that Cypress Hill), have such a sense of textural idealism, their work feels like it deepens shadows and licks whatever gritty highlights are available to it. An eerie, mystical soundscape that crushes philosophy and power into diamonds. To truly sand off the edges, there is also a closing credits song by a legendary sci-fi rapper that I won’t reveal, but please stay for.
It would make sense that director Eddie Alcazar would collaborate with someone like Flying Lotus for a short film entitled FuckkkYouuu, which showcases his proclivities for shadowy strangeness, body contusion and frightening soundscapes, but what really puts my ears back is seeing Steven Soderbergh, Hollywood’s busiest man (I’m personally convinced there are three of him), nestled in the credits as Executive Producer. He has worked previously with Alcazar on his first film, Perfect (2018), but in Divinity I see things that Soderbergh would feel need championed, reflecting his own themes that dominate the politics of his films. Industrial capitalism, commodification of the soul, the deformity of gain and how people become products if we let ourselves be glamoured by vapid idealism. He’s always championed independent film, and with Alcazar it feels like he’s found his weird little guy to use as a reflector of himself: a proud visualist and always finding form to put light on a theme before it scuttles away like a cockroach.
In all the film’s notably and, according to Alcazar, fluid and improvised dialogue, there is one line that lacquers the film more than any. Nikita saying to the Stars:
“Live forever or give life. Pleasure over love”.
Please consider your future before it considers yours for you.
The Reptile House
Weird Weekend present Divinity on Friday 28th June, 2024, part of our monthly screening series at OFFLINE, Glasgow. Tickets are available here.
The Reptile House is the alias of Findlay, which is the nickname of the author himself. A banner under which all collective writing, art, submissions and soon-to-be-screenings is nestled. Reflected in the dark terraces of The Reptile House is cinematic pain and oscillations coming from old Adidas brochures. Always open to collaboration. @antibloom (Follow Findlay on Letterboxd)