Luz: A Woman Walks Into A Bar

It’s not often at all that I watch a film for this thing and can honestly say that I’ve never seen something like it before. I think this is because more often than not, horror film follows a lot of cinematic conventions and traditions. This isn’t a bad thing by any means, and there’s a lot of room for variety within cinematic tradition, even if it’s just taking an established style and pushing it to hallucinogenic extremes. And when horror films push boundaries, they’re generally the boundaries of comfort, rather than the boundaries of cinematic narrative. Which, again, is fine. But every now and then it’s nice to stumble across something that just goes in some other direction entirely from what you’d expect.

And Luz is definitely one of those cases. It’s spare, cryptic, and striking, as much art film as horror film.

We open on what appears to be a lobby or reception area. There’s wood paneling, fluorescent lights, someone sat behind a desk, a couple of vending machines. A young woman walks in, stands there for a minute or two, then walks over to the vending machine and buys a drink. She drinks it, in what is otherwise total silence. Then she walks up to the person behind the desk, and just yells “is this what you wanted to do with your life?”

Elsewhere, another woman strikes up a conversation with a man at a bar. She’s just gotten into town, and she’s looking for someone. It’s been a strange day - her cab driver bailed out of the cab while it was still moving. The man is a psychotherapist, and the woman tells him his services will be needed soon. She’s flirting with him, they’re having multiple drinks together, he’s ignoring his pager as it keeps going off.

And then she drags him into the bathroom for what he expects is going to be an assignation, and she reaches for his face as if to kiss him…

…and light pours from her mouth. When he comes to, she’s gone.

The young woman in the waiting room is Luz, the woman in the bar is Nora, the doctor is Dr. Rossini, and the movie is about how these three people come together. Luz is at a police station after diving out of her moving cab with a passenger in the back. Nora was the passenger, and Dr. Rossini - along with a police officer and a technician, are going to use hypnotic regression to determine why Luz did what she did, and who Nora and Luz are to each other. As it turns out, they’ve known each other since they were in school together as kids, and something happened between them then. Something involving a séance, from which they walked away changed.

The film doesn’t really have a linear story to speak of - there’s Luz, Nora, whatever happened between them when they were at school together, and how that’s come back to haunt them both. It’s a story told through flashbacks and recollection, but very little is actually spelled out at any point. It’s a story told as much (if nor more) visuals than through exposition - the dialogue is minimal - so you get the shape of it without really getting any details or clear sense as to what “really” happened (or is happening), and after a certain point, what’s “really” happening is really beside the point. It’s cryptic, but not obtuse. There are repeated visual motifs and dialogue that create a sense of dreamlike circularity, as if the things we’re seeing and hearing are very important, even if we don’t know exactly why or how.

This is reinforced by a highly impressionistic approach to the narrative. This film uses sound and space in unusual ways (the hypnotic regression sequence that’s especially inventive) that sacrifices a sense of realism for something closer to experimental minimalist theater. Most of it takes place in a single room, but the past walks in and walks around the room as if it’s the present, flashbacks occur through cuts away to past events, but just as often also through the layering of asynchronous sound over reenactment in a way that makes it an abstract representation of past events played out in the present, and characters exchange places and roles, sometimes through the actual donning of the others’ clothes, in a way that manages to be simultaneously symbolic and extremely literal. There’s a sense of distance or remove throughout, with lots of long shots of people placed in the middle of large, anonymous, blandly institutional spaces contrasted with close-ups to punctuate important moments. Color and lighting shift to move between the mundane and the dreamlike, alongside the highly unconventional staging, and the single room functions as a stage of sorts upon which the events play out. This is underpinned by an effective use of music, mostly droning synthesizers and strings, that punctuates the action without becoming overbearing.

So what we basically have is a highly novel take on a demonic possession story. I’ve written here before about the intersection of love and possession, and though this film couldn’t be more different from Ahi Va El Diablo stylistically and narratively, it treads some of the same thematic ground in a way that is as cerebral as that film was visceral Nothing about the film is really realistic in any sense of the word, it’s more of a tone poem than anything else, but it has some really striking moments and doesn’t so much build tension as lull you with a sense of amiable strangeness before reversing hard into something more menacing in the third act. But it’s not weirdness for its own sake - there’s an internal logic here, the unfolding of memory and revelation playing out in ways that forsake traditional narrative for almost pure feeling, and it works well enough that by the end you have the feeling that something very bad has happened, even in something as simple as a person walking through a door. The way even the simplest gestures are fraught with horrible meaning in dreams.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi