Mark Reviews Movies: LUZ

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 1, 2019

With Luz, writer/director Tilman Singer tells a familiar story in such a unique, stylish way that the material, a standard go-to for horror movies, almost feels new again. The plot is basically one about demonic possession, but Singer smartly takes the well-trodden storyline as an opportunity to experiment with perspective and sound, while also breaking down the narrative to its core components.

As such, the entire film runs 70 minutes (including the credits), but that hour-and-change is haunting, evocative, and enigmatic. It's just as a nighttime encounter with some evil, supernatural presence should be.

The actual plot doesn't fully reveal itself until the story arrives at a secondary and final location. At first, it's about the mysterious Nora (Julia Riedler), who's at a bar somewhere in Germany. Also there is a psychiatrist named Dr. Rossini (Jan Bluthardt).

They talk, with Nora being especially interested in the doctor's job and nostalgic about her time at an all-girls Catholic school in South America. There, a fellow classmate claimed to be a medium to the spirit world. By the end of the scene, cramped with the doctor in a bathroom stall, Nora reveals that she might be in touch with that realm by way of an otherworldly kiss.

The rest of the film takes place in a large room at a local police station, where Luz (Luana Velis), the aforementioned classmate, has arrived after jumping out of the taxi she drives for a living. At the behest of a detective (played by Nadja Stübiger), the psychiatrist, dazed after his encounter at the bar, puts Luz into a hypnotic state to find out what happened to her.

That extended hypnosis sequence is masterful in the way Singer, almost exclusively through the soundtrack, shifts between Luz's experience of re-living her night, the reality of what the doctor and the detective are seeing, and the discomforting silence of a translator (played by Johannes Benecke) in a sound-proof booth. As the details of Luz and the doctor's respective encounters become clearer, the line between imagined and real horrors becomes thinner (The film, shot on 16 mm, possesses the graininess and speckles of a last-known photo). Characters transform, and the room becomes a minimalist hellscape of mist and light.

The storytelling of Luz is simple, if cryptically evasive at times. There is nothing simplistic about Singer's technique in the telling.

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