An inky black void bathed in blinding holy light, scuzzy droning synths and modernist isolationism, a grotesque hedonistic landscape of pleasure and experience pushing the limits of mind and body into a new dimension of spiraling transcension. Twisted, demonic, and desperately clawing at the surface of the cosmos. Granted absolution from the confining chains of humanity while something deep within rots away. Avarice in search of beauty, torn down by the violent hubris of wealth until you become consumed by your own flesh.
Eddie Alcazar’s Divinity constructs itself like a fascinating blend of psychedelic midnight cinema and arthouse industrialist noise; a bizarre conflux of influence and ideation that constructs a brutally grungy pitch black satire of the psychotically rich filtered through a dizzying flash of vascular roid rage muscle men, ethereal space cults, sex, blood, science, and brutality. If this sounds as wildly incoherent as it does eminently compelling, you’ve landed at most of what Divinity has to offer. A lot of surface level appropriation of legendary experimental cinematic imagery, flooded with emphatic Ideas about wealth and transactional relationships: the selfish desire to live colliding against the innate need to create life and legacy, self-destruction through ambition, the essence of humanity, our desire to experience beyond ourselves – it goes on. The problem is that, much like its imagery, none of these ideas mean anything beyond their mere existence. It is the metaphysical science-fiction version of fast food photography, curated and stylized to evoke enough of the right reference points that you forget you’re looking at complete artifice.
It doesn’t make the surface any less compelling, there’s something timelessly magnetic about thudding, crunchy synths behind 16mm scuzz with overcranked contrast moving through the opulent architecture of the affluent. Dystopian industrialism is certainly a landscape worth exploring, and pulling from Eraserhead (1977) and Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) makes for a thrilling elevator pitch. There’s just nothing to dig into, and the more vapid and vague it becomes the more tiresome and inert it feels. While its chosen aesthetic is admirable in its expressive specificity, it is also not particularly proficient at it or doing anything affecting with its imagery. The aforementioned reference points ultimately work against the film itself, as they infuse their visions of monochromatic nightmares with dynamic purpose. Largely, Divinity’s hypercontrast just makes everything obfuscated and frustrating – a nightmare to look at, but not quite wielding that in the way it may intend to.
The narrative itself is so effervescently threadbare that there’s little to nothing to explain or reflect on. Once again, it aims at something familiar – the kind of cinema that might garner a swath of videos from the “CRAZY MOVIE EXPLAINED” YouTube crowd, with hints and details dropped throughout at the wider world the film exists in. There’s just nothing here worth explaining, and what can be unpacked isn’t particularly interesting. Stephen Dorff plays the wealthy heir to Divinity, the titular drug capable of granting immortality who sits in his glass-walled desert palace, women falling at his feet while he works tirelessly on the formulation of his latest batch of synthetics. This alone is an easy enough marker for the mode the film is in, this kind of slipshod objectification wrapped in experimentation while it throws skin and sex at the screen, a lazy and empty attempt at some kind of transgressive evocation. Two mysterious men covered in tattoos break in and kidnap Dorff, women materialize like fallen angels sent to deliver humanity from its sins, and eventually Dorff overdoses on his own drug and becomes a horrifying, deformed muscle demon. This moment gives way to the film’s best attempt at becoming something more interesting, a hyperviolent showcase of actual cinematic expression through a slick combination of Harryhausen-esque claymation and bloody action. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late. At least Divinity has the good sense not to live forever.