Luz (2019)

I can thank my friend for introducing me to Lost Highway a few years back. I’ve always been a fan of David Lynch, but had never bothered with that film until he described it as not only Lynch’s most underrated film, but also his best. After watching it once, I was inclined to agree with him, it’s a phenomenal piece of cinema, and I couldn’t help but feel its influence over Luz as I watched this equal parts bizarre and horrifying spectacle play out.

The reason I bring this up is because Luz shares a similar, almost cyclical structure that Lost Highway does and it also shares – at least I think it does – the same sort of internal logic that Lynch’s films adhere to. It is in no way the logic of our world, but it is consistent and makes sense within this universe.

The problem with Luz – or more accurately, with myself – is that I don’t see anyway for me to really talk about the narrative as, much like a Lynch film, I would really need to see it a good three times or so to really unpack what exactly was going on. Instead, it will be far easier to just discuss the visual, aural feast that is Luz.

This is Tilman Singer’s debut. No, sorry, not just debut his goddamn student thesis film! That’s an impressive feat. Luz takes a lot of horror movie tropes and inverts them and twists them until it becomes entirely impossible to predict what’s really going on or what will happen next.

At its core, if we want to just put it into the simplest of terms, Luz is a possession story. A young cabdriver walks into a dilapidated police station claiming that she’s been assaulted by a former classmate, then it turns out there’s a demon possessing a number of the characters. Pretty standard horror fare thus far, yes? But Singer takes this trope, and a number of others that could simply be clichés if handled any other way, and utilises them in such a way, along with a barrage of searing images – all shot in beautifully grainy 16mm and accompanied by a swelling synth soundtrack that sounds lifted straight out of Carpenter or Kubrick – that it’s almost as though the audience is being punished for daring to assume they’d made sense of any of it. I’ll admit that I was guilty myself of being arrogant enough to think I’d figured out what Luz really was.

My only real criticism of Luz is that I wish there was more of it. Obviously its seventy minute runtime is perfectly adequate for – I can’t stress this enough – a student’s thesis, but I wish I could have spent more time with this film, and I wish I could have spent more time unfurling what the hell was really going on. I honestly can’t wait to see more from Singer in the future, because, if Luz is anything to go by, all of it is going to be wonderful.

Director: Tilman Singer
Writers: Tilman Singer (screenplay), Tilman Singer
Stars: Johannes Benecke, Jan Bluthardt, Lilli Lorenz