So was Tilman Singer’s first feature, 2018’s Luz, as inventive as Cuckoo, his most recent one (starring Hunter Schafer)? Yes, is the answer, though Luz is inventive in an entirely different way. It plays about with time in ways that are unusual – Singer doesn’t do flashbacks and flashforwards so much as infect the here and now with snatches of what’s happened and what’s about to come.
It sounds like it’s hard to follow and at first it is, but by the end Singer has given us enough plot for us to have a grasp of what’s been going on. This seems to be, in as much as we can tell, the story of a young woman, Luz (Luana Velis), who grows up having a tough time of it (orphanage? boarding school?) and later becomes possessed by a demon while working as a cab driver.
As the action opens, Luz has just thrown herself clear of her taxi and has turned up at an almost deserted police station where she asks the cop behind the desk if this is really how he wanted to live his life. It is an odd thing to say to a cop, doubly so when we realise much later on that she’s saying it after having just thrown herself out of a moving car to escape a demon. But actually this line of dialogue doesn’t belong in this scene, it belongs in another one, which actually relates to an earlier point in Luz’s life but which we experience later in the movie.
Yeh. The remarkable thing about this movie is that it’s a student work, made by Singer as his graduation piece from the Cologne Academy of Media Arts. It is entirely assured, lives in its own perfectly imagined little word and has a conceptual approach to horror that brackets it closely to sci-fi. Time travel, of a sort, is happening, even if it’s only in the relationship the audience has with the events in the film.
Singer has the right stuff, in other words, and just in case we’re wondering if he’s all brain and no technique, he treats us to an opening scene that’s all locked-shot/static camera and long take before switching into medium and close-up shots for his next scene, in which a woman called Nora introduces herself to a doctor at a bar and proceeds to tell him the story of Luz, part of her story at least.
The lighting is blue, in a homage to 1980s horror movies, and Singer gives us escalating rhythms in his editing while Jan Bluthardt (who will turn up in Cuckoo in a significant role) and Julia Riedler – who play the two people at the bar – slide their performances from cool to sweaty as the revelations pile up.
Singer gets a lot of mileage out of very simple props and effects. Coloured lights shift the mood. Some contact lenses turn the human into the demon. At one point Bluthardt’s Dr Rossini strips naked and puts on a woman’s black dress and a bra, then pats his non-existent breasts proprietorially. Very odd but very effective.
At another point, using a scene in which Dr Rossini hypnotises Luz, Singer smuggles a massive amount of exposition onto the screen, while his two characters enact scenes from Luz’s past sitting on chairs in an interview room, as if they were rehearsing a play. Very economical.
The film is full of such narrative tricks, as well as evocative storytelling and in a sense its least interesting element is the story itself – maybe the demon is a manifestation of Luz’s “demons”, maybe Singer is trying to get a sense of what schizophrenia feels like onto the screen, it doesn’t matter in a way, and to an extent Luz remains as confusing as I’ve made it sound.
For all the excellence at the conceptual level, and the nicely wrought performances by Bluthardt, Velis and Riedler, the film holds us at arm’s length emotionally. It’s the only thing you can really say against it, that it’s not entirely dramatically energised. Still fascinating though, and a remarkable debut.
Luz – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
