LuzSome say that hypnosis is an invitation for evil spirits to possess your soul. Luz is a suspense film peppered with psychological and supernatural horror. It is about the eponymous Luz Carrara (Luana Velis), an antisocial taxi driver who is brought in by the police for questioning. Either a lack of cooperation or a language barrier prompts Detective Bertillon (Nadja Stübiger)--the officer in charge of the investigation--to summon Dr. Rossini (Jan Bluthardt), who puts Luz under a form of hypnosis, attempting to glean what she isn't telling them. Before and during the experiment, a mysterious power manipulates these people, threatening their very souls.
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Luz is written and directed by Tilman Singer, who pays homage to a style of Eighties-era European thrillers with this film, complete with a synth-rich musical score, cinematography consistent with the genre, and a plot that favors style over coherence. Yet a large part of what makes Luz so endearing is its ambiguity. Very little is defined, and what exposition is present is often just another way to maintain the movie's eerie mood. When Dr. Rossini is first seen, he is nursing a martini (or something resembling one) at a hovel of a bar that looks like someone's basement--a detail that adds to the film's ambiance. He is approached by a woman named Nora Vanderkurt (Julia Riedler), who plies him with an array of unusual color-changing cocktails as she regales him with the story of Luz and when they went to Catholic school together. In another film, Nora's conversation with Rossini would be a preamble to a seduction in the seedy bar, but Luz has stranger plans for the duo. She tells Rossini that Luz was something of a "medium", and credits her for having a talent for getting people to believe what she told them. For instance, after Luz got sick because she claimed that the cafeteria smelled of rotting fish, Nora and her schoolmates became ill shortly thereafter. Nora recalls when Luz performed a ritual with a girl who had become accidentally pregnant. Luz surrounded the girl with candles and chanted a deliberately sacrilegious corruption of the Lord's Prayer--the same one she chants in the police station. While Nora tells Rossini her story, they imbibe cocktails with a kind of ritualistic behavior--the kind that often accompanies having mixed drinks at a bar, just exaggerated a bit. There is a pervading vibe throughout Luz that is simultaneously surreal and nightmarish; this introductory scene between Rossini and Nora sets a tone which lasts throughout the whole film. Similar films that have this unsettling aura to them include David Cronenberg's Scanners; both films feel like something you might have dreamed...and woke from in a cold sweat.
One of the greatest strengths of Luz is in its way of withholding explanation about events or deliberately muddying them to provoke its audience's imagination. Several instances leave the audience suspecting that in this key moment, something happened that has influenced the rest of the plot, like Luz's recollection of the ritual she performed on Margarita (Lilli Lorenz). The strangeness is compounded by Rossini's unorthodox method of hypnosis, which essentially has Luz recreate the day in question leading up to the incident that brought her into police custody. She is seated in an arrangement of chairs meant to represent her cab, complete with a rear-view mirror. Other than Luz, Rossini, and Bertillon is Bertillon's assistant and Spanish translator, Olarte (Johannes Benecke), who interprets Luz's native Spanish into German from a sound room. Luz believes that she is back in her cab, dancing to the radio and searching for fares. When she simulates adjusting the volume in her "cab", the music comes over the score and further blurs fantasy and reality. The ambiguity of Luz even extends to time and place. The film resembles midnight movie fare from the Eighties, despite being made in 2018. Most of the characters speak German, though Luz primarily speaks Spanish; but the only other clue about the film's setting comes from her hat which says "Chile" on it. Luz feels somewhat claustrophobic because there are virtually no scenes that are set outside. Most of the film takes place either at the police station or the bar, with only brief flashbacks to the backseat of Luz's cab. Like Luz, the audience feels trapped--by the police and by whatever mysterious power is manipulating Luz and those around her. This malevolence is never fully identified or explained in Luz, save for a scant few moments that suggest that it might be some demonic force. Luz may be cynical of worship from her unhappy days in Catholic school, but there seems to be the sense that she is someone that the forces of darkness are eager to destroy. (Consider that her name translates as "light".) Whether Luz knows it or not--or deliberately tries to fight it--she seems to have been touched by some power...a power that is desirable to some evil. But Luz has no interest in fighting or comprehending whatever this force is. Her motivations are similar to so many of us: to get by in the shadows of our own little corner of life, without being drawn out into the light and scrutinized.
Recommended for: Fans of a surreal and vivid suspense film modeled after vintage European thrillers from the Eighties. Luz is designed for audiences who are drawn to this kind of filmmaking, where style and aesthetics take the wheel, and where a dreamlike plot adds to the film's mystique.
One of the greatest strengths of Luz is in its way of withholding explanation about events or deliberately muddying them to provoke its audience's imagination. Several instances leave the audience suspecting that in this key moment, something happened that has influenced the rest of the plot, like Luz's recollection of the ritual she performed on Margarita (Lilli Lorenz). The strangeness is compounded by Rossini's unorthodox method of hypnosis, which essentially has Luz recreate the day in question leading up to the incident that brought her into police custody. She is seated in an arrangement of chairs meant to represent her cab, complete with a rear-view mirror. Other than Luz, Rossini, and Bertillon is Bertillon's assistant and Spanish translator, Olarte (Johannes Benecke), who interprets Luz's native Spanish into German from a sound room. Luz believes that she is back in her cab, dancing to the radio and searching for fares. When she simulates adjusting the volume in her "cab", the music comes over the score and further blurs fantasy and reality. The ambiguity of Luz even extends to time and place. The film resembles midnight movie fare from the Eighties, despite being made in 2018. Most of the characters speak German, though Luz primarily speaks Spanish; but the only other clue about the film's setting comes from her hat which says "Chile" on it. Luz feels somewhat claustrophobic because there are virtually no scenes that are set outside. Most of the film takes place either at the police station or the bar, with only brief flashbacks to the backseat of Luz's cab. Like Luz, the audience feels trapped--by the police and by whatever mysterious power is manipulating Luz and those around her. This malevolence is never fully identified or explained in Luz, save for a scant few moments that suggest that it might be some demonic force. Luz may be cynical of worship from her unhappy days in Catholic school, but there seems to be the sense that she is someone that the forces of darkness are eager to destroy. (Consider that her name translates as "light".) Whether Luz knows it or not--or deliberately tries to fight it--she seems to have been touched by some power...a power that is desirable to some evil. But Luz has no interest in fighting or comprehending whatever this force is. Her motivations are similar to so many of us: to get by in the shadows of our own little corner of life, without being drawn out into the light and scrutinized.
Recommended for: Fans of a surreal and vivid suspense film modeled after vintage European thrillers from the Eighties. Luz is designed for audiences who are drawn to this kind of filmmaking, where style and aesthetics take the wheel, and where a dreamlike plot adds to the film's mystique.