[WARNING: this review contains spoilers for the film DIVINE HAMMER. Minor spoilers occur throughout. The section that discusses the ending of the film is clearly marked, so you can bail if you need to. I do not believe that knowing things about this film will spoil the experience of watching it for you, and I hope you will seek it out regardless.]

A lonely girl in Seattle vomits in the street, overwhelmed with anxiety over the prospect of meeting up with a potential romantic interest. Two-thousand miles away, another lonely girl uses a Five Nights at Freddy’s shirt to crush a spider, shoving the evidence under her bare mattress. 

These are Hollie and Rose, the protagonists of DIVINE HAMMER. The main thing they have in common is that they’re both gorehounds, raised in the simmering scum-ringed bath of rotten.com and 4chan image board atrocities. But they have other things in common too: alienation, irony poisoning, and the kind of dissociated near-existence many trans people find themselves in when their only friends exist on the other side of a screen.

So of course they meet on Discord, two multi-colored flashing blocks glimmering and one-upping each other about who can handle the gnarliest shit. You can hear the excitement in their voices as they realize they’re both women, both compelled by the bizarre and grotesque, and both on the cusp of finding a similarly warped kindred spirit. They bond over a shared disdain for wannabe school shooters and staged violence. They want to find images of real lives ending, real people shattered to red bits of real bones and flesh instead of butcher’s remnants and Hershey’s syrup. 

One of them proposes an idea: they take a bunch of second-hand cameras and use them to record evidence of their murder-suicide pact. They will spend as much time together as it takes for one of them to get up the nerve to kill the other. The camera(s) that record the deed will be put on eBay by the survivor, in hopes that the evidence will be discovered by the unwitting purchasers and inspire further violence. 

One girl says, “Let’s usher in a new era of death.”

The other replies, “How soon can you get to Pennsylvania?”

If I told you that this was the setup for the most feel-good buddy comedy I’ve seen so far this year, would you believe me? 

DIVINE HAMMER is the latest theater release by Muscle Distribution, a boutique film distribution company run by historian and archivist Elizabeth Purcell. Purcell is one of the first names I share with people who are looking for queer and trans cinema that goes beyond the typical Pride Month listicle. It has been wonderful to see Purcell put together a library of films that honors the transgressive bits of our media history while also creating a platform for experimental cutting-edge narratives about our present and future. Purcell brought Monika Treut back to theaters and CASTRATION MOVIE 1 to the Criterion Channel. She is a reliable champion for films that people like me should pay attention to, and trusting her tastes has never led me wrong.

DIVINE HAMMER is a worthy addition to the Muscle catalogue—a movie with both a loving investment in the past and a deep interest in the future of cinema. It is an example of “MP4 Cinema,” a cinema movement comprised of modern features made with limited budgets and minimal, often old-fashioned equipment. More and more filmmakers are embracing a lo-fi approach, and DIVINE HAMMER is an excellent example of how to make this engaging. Pivotal scenes are punctuated with title cards explaining what obsolete camera the action is being filmed on, and the movie’s “gore” effects are a fourth-wall-breaking DIY delight. 

DIVINE HAMMER charmingly evokes the era of classic shot-on-VHS splatter parties like VIDEO VIOLENCE, and is full of winks and nudges for people who love gory, transgressive cinema. But it also contains a deeply humanizing affection for those people. The movie made me feel nostalgia for my own nascent internet years, and the many hours I spent escaping my body by trading clips with other weirdos and washing my brain of its sorrows with bright red giallo blood. It also reminded me of how utterly alone I felt until I met other people like myself, and how much it meant to be seen for the first time as the person I really am.

The importance of friendship is the unexpected thesis of DIVINE HAMMER. In the filmed Q&A shown after the FACETS premiere, the M. Sisters explained how their actual friendship influenced the film they created together. They met on a Discord server, and realized they had common tastes after one made an offhand reference to the infamous ero guro flick MAI-CHAN’S DAILY LIFE. They became friends and collaborators, and eventually one invited the other to visit them in Pennsylvania and make a film. That film is DIVINE HAMMER, an autofictional document of their bond and a tribute to the nasty things that inspired it.

I have extra details about the lives of the people who created DIVINE HAMMER because I attended the Q&A at FACETS and I kinda-sorta followed Hazel M.’s YouTube stuff back in the day. Based on the context I have, I feel comfortable referring to this as a work of autofictional trans cinema. "Autofiction" refers to works where authors draw on their own life experiences to create their text, but embellish their work with fictional elements to tell a specific story. It is both true and untrue, in the service of the author's intent.

I am fascinated by the current vogue of autofiction in trans cinema. It seems like most of the movies I enjoy have some mixture of biographical detail and metaphor. Sometimes this is made explicit, like in THE PEOPLE’S JOKER where Vera Drew recounts her time and transition in alt comedy scenes through the lens of superhero parody. (As someone who used to be a female comedian, I can testify to its accuracy.) Other times it’s squishier;  BROS BEFORE is definitely a film that is inspired by experiencing homoerotic transmasc friendships, but I can’t confidently say some version of those specific events happened to writer and director Henry Hanson.  

It is important to note textual ambiguity in autofiction, because it helps us understand the intent of the work. In my overly analytical opinion, there is a purposeful ambiguity about the transness of the protagonists of DIVINE HAMMER. In one scene, a woman has bloody underwear that may be the result of a period or a nosebleed; in another a woman recounts trying to fit in with the boys at a summer camp through mutilating a dead frog, which is the sort of macho bonding experience I was distinctly uninvited from as a young presumed-girl. Gender is just one theme it playfully pokes at, among many others.

All of this is to say that DIVINE HAMMER is not necessarily a movie that is explicitly about capital-T Transness, but the realities common to trans lives are still very much a part of the film.

[BIG SPOILERS START BELOW THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING DO NOT YELL AT ME LATER]

Because DIVINE HAMMER is grounded in the real lives of its protagonists, it feels authentic to trans experiences in a way many other movies do not. Trans people watching this film will not question why one woman dropped everything in her life to do a weird, scary art project with a woman in another state. They will not be confused by the fact that one of them is so dissociated from her daily life that her home is bare, she has no food, and she greets people with protectively unchecked hostility. 

Most of us trans folks know these girls, or are these girls. My life and my Bluesky timeline are full of girls like this, and I love them with all my heart. 

DIVINE HAMMER loves them too, which is what gives the movie its emotional core. I spent most of the movie terrified that the dam would break, that one would kill the other, that there would be some kind of nasty cynical bow on the whole thing that would make me sorry I’d gotten invested in their friendship. Instead, it did the opposite. 

And this is the truly remarkable part of DIVINE HAMMER, and why I feel it gestures at the future of trans cinema. This movie should have been an absolute bummer. I expected it to be dreary and cynical and gross, cathartic but not affirming. But because it centers the very real friendship of the M. Sisters and the things that they make together, it becomes a legitimately heartwarming affair.

Once Hollie actually makes it to Pennsylvania, the time they spend getting to know each other quickly undermines their horrible plans. Instead of killing each other to create authentic snuff content, they decide to stage a series of fake murders for their digital cameras and see who they can trick with their work. In the process of manufacturing fake violence, they find a relationship that is sustaining and real.

Brilliantly understated scenes of emotional confession allow the girls to open up and accept help and companionship from each other. The staged gore setpieces they work together to create are genuinely hilarious and also add to the authenticity of the film. (A scene where they attempt to make a squib blood-shooting rig was especially funny to me as someone who spent much of my teenage years helping weirdos make horror movies in their backyards. That shit never works right!) 

Because DIVINE HAMMER is trans cinema, it is naturally in conversation with other movies about trans folks. People like me who watch a lot of these movies will notice common themes; for example, the age gap between our two protagonists provides some moments of discomfort similar to the central parasocial friendship in WE’RE ALL GOING TO THE WORLD’S FAIR. Likewise, the claustrophobically supportive mumblecore friendships in CASTRATION MOVIE 1 find an echo in the ways Hollie cares for Rose in DIVINE HAMMER. 

However, DIVINE HAMMER differs in its execution. Instead of dwelling in the tragedy implied by these factors, it simply accepts them as a matter of everyday life for these characters. DIVINE HAMMER’S disinterest in depicting capital-T Trans Trauma allows the movie to tell a different kind of story about these things.

Yes, one of them is younger than the other. Age gap friendships are extremely common among trans folks, because we all come out at different times for different reasons. Some of us make our first trans friends in our teen years. I didn’t even know being a trans man was an option for me until I nearly hit menopause. It just kinda happens, and it’s not necessarily sinister. 

Yes, Rose needs a lot from Hollie and Hollie needs a lot from Rose. Pretty much every trans person I know has struggled with the lack of support caused by family estrangement and social ostracization, so it makes sense that we are extremely dependent on the people who actually stick around. And yes, it’s sad sometimes, but it’s also just life.

These factors absolutely influence the plot, but the movie does not dwell on them. What the movie dwells on instead is the gift of a friendship where one feels truly seen by another person, maybe for the first time in their lives. DIVINE HAMMER somehow captures what it feels like to meet other trans people in real life, away from the posturing of social media and the need to flatten oneself into content. 

Hollie and Rose present themselves to the internet as bloodthirsty freaks. They’re also those people when they aren’t online, of course, but interacting with each other in real life allows them to appreciate each other as people and find happiness in their mutual creativity. 

Spending time with them and the art they make together is a pleasure, even as they’re bitching at each other about how they need to eat real food sometimes. It is a genuine joy to witness, and a story relatable to myself and all of the other trans people I know who first found connection with each other via transgressive art. 

The final scene of DIVINE HAMMER features a chainsaw and a lagoon of fake blood; it also features our protagonists embracing and laughing, delighted by the thing they have created together. One of them ducks down and faces the camera, glowing with delight, and crows, “You can just do this!”

Yes, you can, and I hope you do. This is the future I want for trans cinema. I want trans folks to reject the frame of our existence as a tragedy and celebrate our complexities instead. I want trans folks to be inspired to talk about their lives, to capture the relationships that are important to them, and to create a body of work that celebrates the unique way in which we navigate the world. I want trans folks to get the fuck off of Discord and hang out in real life every now and then. 

I want a new era of death. Don’t you?