LUZ (R)
Released By Screen Media
With gorgeous, widescreen cinematography (shot on 16mm with anamorphic lenses) and spectacular sound design, LUZ is an aesthetically beautiful, well-acted film that unfortunately struggles to grab the audience due to an undermining of character and plot. Too bad, because there is much to admire from this talented crew in front of and behind the camera.
The plot and characters are thin. This film can barely contain its 70 minutes running time. However, I do admire director Tilman Singer for not dragging this film, his college thesis, out any longer. LUZ feels as long as it should be, luckily ending before completely running out of plot and testing the audiences patience.
LUZ’s simple plot begins with a bloodied cab driver entering a police station after a car accident, where she stands around quietly, drinks a soda, and starts yelling at the receptionist in Spanish. This is Luz (Luana Velis), a young Chilean living in Germany. Luz dresses tomboyish and likes reciting evil renditions of the Lord’s Prayer. This, plus a minor backstory about her time in Catholic School years prior is about all we will ever know about her character.
Meanwhile, we meet an on-call Doctor/Psychoanalyst named Rosini (Jan Bluthardt) hanging out in a local bar where Nora, a woman from Luz’s past, tells Rosini the aforementioned Catholic School backstory. Nora then convinces the good Doctor into going into the bathroom with her for God knows what. Not a great idea for Rosini, but alas, he goes anyway. After a truly absurd, funny and disturbing lavatory exchange, the Doctor is paged into work, being called into the police station to help with the Luz situation.
Back at the police station, our characters finally meet. All hell is about to let loose during the surreal interrogation that will play out in the rest of the film’s run time. Sounds boring? Luckily, it’s not. This is where the film begins to work, especially in an inventive scene where, under hypnosis, Luz reenacts the cab drive that brought her to the police station. Actress Velis pantomimes and monologues (with the help of great sound design) her way through multiple characters and exchanges with deadpan conviction, selling Tillman’s minimalist tale of possession with art-house bravado. Not to be outdone, Actor Bluthardt unravels and reveals his true insidious form with terror and swagger, never letting the audience laugh (because you easily could have) at the strange demonic possession that has taken place inside him.
The whole film is very dreamy and atmospheric. This is both the movies greatest asset and the worst. The audience is never allowed to connect with anything or anyone due to being left in a literal haze. But it is a gorgeous haze, gray and hellish, containing our ensemble in biblical imprisonment. We never quite know why these people are being punished, or what this evil wants with Luz in particular. We are led to believe it had something to do with the Catholic School days where evil things happened, but nothing is for certain in a plot as light as this. We just take the ideas at face value. This demon just seems fixated on finding its way back to Luz, so we just give the hellion the benefit of the doubt.
And that’s about it.
I wish there was more to grab onto in LUZ. I really appreciate Singers’ aesthetic eye and the actor’s dedication through the absurd, so it comes with a recommendation. However, I do want to see Singer take on a larger story and see how he handles film plots in scope and not just the cinematography.
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