Fantastic Film Fest 2024 Review - Divinity
Images courtesy of Original Spin.
In Divinity, writer-director Eddie Alcazar seems to have crafted a readymade cult object. A film completely furnished with textual references, grotesque violence, hyper-stylised visuals, and mixed media experimentation, seemingly destined to attract a small coterie of like-minded fans and repeat viewers. The only issue is that I can’t imagine anyone sitting through this twice.
Perhaps part of the problem is the film’s unrelentingly bleak setting, a dystopian earth where the fertility rate has hit 97%. The solution to this crisis seems to come from Jaxxon Pierce (Stephen Dorff), a wealthy recluse who has created a substance called Divinity that his father (Scott Bakula) began working on before dying. The drug promises eternal youth and physical perfection at the steep cost of the user’s fertility. Its imminent release and the prospect of eternal life for all humans attracts the attention of two aliens (Jason Genao and Moisés Arias) who arrive to stop the drug from disrupting the natural order. They do this by forcing Jaxxon to ingest huge amounts of his own product, gradually turning him into a hulking monster. It’s a promising premise for a low-budget science fiction film but it’s undercut by a muddled delivery, with the film alternating between telling the viewer too little and too much, rarely providing a reason to care about anything that’s happening until it’s too late.
The lack of narrative drive puts the onus on its stylised visuals to keep viewers engaged. The prosthetics used for the monster transformation are a highlight, and the effects are uniformly impressive, working with the high contrast black and white to hide any indications of its meagre budget, while creating some genuinely arresting imagery. Shot on 16mm film stock, Divinity takes heavy inspiration from midnight movies such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo the Iron Man. Alcazar has even contracted Lynch’s soundman, Dean Hurley, to provide the films pulsing ambient score. But unlike those films, Divinity rarely lets its visuals speak for themselves. This is apparent from the opening, wherein a kaleidoscopic non-verbal visual montage gives way to Scott Bakula bluntly explaining the premise directly to camera.
Likewise, the moral problem at the centre of its sci-fi premise – should Divinity be allowed to exist or not - is treated with little ambivalence, and what could have been a multifaceted ethical dilemma is answered in a disappointingly direct and one-sided manner. Alcazar is similarly heavy handed in communicating his disapproval of engineered physical perfection, embodied by the depiction of Jaxxon’s brother Rip (played by four-time Mr Olympia Mike O’Hearn). There’s a disconnect between the message and the form here, and it’s a critique that begins to feel hypocritical when paired with the fetishistic gaze he renders those same characters in.
Perhaps Divinity’s biggest shortcoming is its depressing tone, and its eccentric content is presented with such drab seriousness that there’s little fun to be had. Combined with the lack of intrigue it’s able to wring out of its premise and the lacklustre narrative, the film is left with little appeal outside of some excellent technical craftsmanship. The climactic battle attempts to inject some excitement back in, but it is so out of step with everything that came before that it results in a feeling of tonal whiplash. For some, the craft and distinctive style may be enough to warrant the initial price of admission, but the film is unlikely to garner the same type of cult audience as its influences.
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Divinity is screening as part of Fantastic Film Festival Australia 2024. The festival runs from the 17th of April to the 10th of May, check out the festival website for tickets and more info here.