Less a horror film and more a carnival-style hall of mirrors, writer-director Tilman Singer\u2019s festival hit <\/span>Luz<\/i><\/b> is an elaborate maze-like debut feature. Visually dazzling, relentlessly provocative, hyper-erotic, languidly paced, and deliberately incoherent \u2014 much like the artiest European horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s (<\/span>Suspiria<\/span><\/i> and all of the giallo classics certainly come to mind, though there\u2019s certainly plenty of Cronenberg thrown in for good measure) \u2014 it\u2019s impossible to imagine any two audience members walking out and agreeing on exactly what transpired. And that\u2019s by design.<\/span><\/p>\n Shot on grainy 16mm by cinematographer Paul Faltz to give the film even more of a surreal nightmarish feel, <\/span>Luz<\/span><\/i> opens at a snail\u2019s pace in a super-industrial-looking, all-but-deserted lobby in a police precinct in an unnamed German city late at night, where a young female taxi driver (Luana Veliz, looking a lot like Winona Ryder\u2019s tomboyish <\/span>Night on Earth<\/span><\/i> character of the same profession) has wandered in seeking assistance. The woman\u2019s name is Luz Carrara, and she appears to have suffered some sort of psychotic break after a \u201cchance\u201d (or is it?) meeting with Nora (Julia Riedler), a woman she went to Catholic school with a decade or so earlier in their native Chile. (Judging by the fashion and the technology seen on-screen, the \u201cpresent day\u201d for Luz seems to be the mid- to late \u201980s.)<\/span><\/p>\n The fairly short (but certainly not sweet) film \u2014 shot as a thesis, and clocking in at around 70 minutes \u2014 jumps back and forth between Luz\u2019s memories of the childhood encounters she and Nora had with the occult, and her interrogation at the hands of a hypnotherapist, Dr. Rossini (Jan Bluthardt), who has been possessed by the same demon that has haunted Luz and Nora. The further they delve into Luz\u2019s traumatic memories from her school, the more confused and incoherent the film\u2019s narrative becomes, resulting in some truly nightmarish imagery sure to keep you up at night. (And just try getting the film\u2019s rather sacrilegious version of the lord\u2019s prayer, \u201c<\/span>Thy will be done \/ in the crotch of an old grandpa,<\/span><\/i>\u201d out of your head.)<\/span><\/p>\n The majority of <\/span>Luz<\/span><\/i>\u2019s action takes place in said sparse police precinct, thanks to the film\u2019s limited budget, and Singer and his crew use that to their advantage; composer Simon Waskow\u2019s moody, synth-driven score only helps to ratchet up the claustrophobic notion of being trapped inside of your own brain while an external force takes over the controls. It\u2019s eerie to watch Luz \u2014 covered in blood of mysterious origins \u2014 physically re-create the night\u2019s events in front of two detectives and a horrified translator, especially as everyone in the room seemingly begins to lose their minds. The filmmakers use practical effects throughout to add to the atmosphere, but much of the horror is conveyed through the power of suggestion and the viewer\u2019s imagination.<\/span><\/p>\n The engrossing, occasionally frustrating final product \u2014 which ends almost exactly as it begins, with Luz walking out of the police precinct at the end of a long night \u2014 is surprisingly original, especially given its many reference points, but unfortunately the story feels like it has been stretched beyond its limits to get it to feature-length status. On the visual strength of this distinctive calling card alone, however, I expect the horror genre will be seeing a lot more of Singer in the not-so-distant future. And that\u2019s a good thing, especially if you\u2019re into the work of modern French auteurs H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cattet and Bruno Forzani (<\/span>The Strange Colors of Your Body\u2019s Tears<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Let the Corpses Tan<\/span><\/i>), whose work veers to the more challenging, less commercial side of the spectrum, to put things mildly.<\/span><\/p>\n Less a horror film and more a carnival-style hall of mirrors, writer-director Tilman Singer\u2019s festival hit Luz is an elaborate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":568,"featured_media":12362,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: B-<\/span><\/h3>\n
1 hr., 10 min.; not rated; in subtitled German and Spanish<\/em><\/h5>\n
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