Divinity (2023)

2 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Youth Without Truth

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

In the end, its sci-fi message is tediously simple, but points must be given for strange presentation: grungy, black-and-white cinematography, striking composition, and even a stop-motion fight scene!

Jaxxon Pierce (Stephen Dorff) has perfected a special anti-aging formula that he calls "Divinity" and sells as a designer drug, even though his inventor father (Scott Bakula) had different ideas in mind.

Two mysterious brothers (Moises Arias and Jason Genao) appear in Jaxxon's mansion and hold him prisoner, while subjecting him to enormous amounts of his own formula. Sex worker Nikita (Karrueche Tran) arrives and mistakes the brothers as the ones who hired her.

Meanwhile, Ziva (Bella Thorne) has made it her mission to round up all the fertile women in the world, given that "Divinity" takes away a person's ability to have children.

Then, everything comes to a head on the night of Jaxxon's birthday, when his bodybuilder brother Rip (Michael O'Hearn) arrives to find a hideously mutated Jaxxon.

Divinity is like so many sci-fi tales in that its theme is pretty obvious, pretty surfacey. Most people choose to be selfish rather than selfless, it complains. It even has a villain's speech in which he chastises his father for being too cowardly to do what was necessary to complete the formula.

Indeed, most of the dialogue is pretty stiff and routine, especially the stuff that poor Thorne has to spout, keeping a straight face while pacing and wrapped in white robes. (Why was such a wild performer cast in such a starchy role?)

And yet the movie still manages to feel more bizarre and unsettling than it does familiar. Its entire design is something otherworldly, consistently going down dark tunnels toward strange choices and unsettling or unexpected behavior. Indeed, Divinity has the feel of one of those obscure cult items that were made on minuscule budgets and were talked about in whispers, like Liquid Sky or Forbidden Zone.

Whether it will actually achieve any kind of following is up for grabs, but it may be worth a look for the morbidly curious.