Luz

I recently saw Cuckoo, Tillman Singer's breakout movie from 2024. I wasn't as in love with it as some others were, but I did enjoy it, enough to inspire me to look up his filmography. To my surprise, he'd only directed one other feature length movie prior to Cuckoo, this movie, Luz. Luz is about (as much as anything about this movie can be called "about" something, but more on that in a minute) a woman who, while in school, performed some sort of ritual on a classmate. The ritual opened a door for a demon to cross through, and the demon fell in love with Luz. For years, it has been stalking Luz, trying to find her, and now it has, and she doesn't know it. All she knows is she's in a police station, answering questions about a car accident, and the interrogator is harboring the demon. Tillman Singer's career thus far -- all two movies -- reminds me a lot of Radiohead. If you're not familiar with their work, Radiohead's first album, Pablo Honey, is a dull, uninspired slog of a thing; there are a few decent songs, but on the whole, it is a tired repetition of early 90's grunge cliches. Their second album, The Bends, would not just be an improvement, but a quantum leap in quality. They were still in touch with guitar-driven alternative, but blended it with more art rock stylings that set it apart from peers, and laid a pathway to them becoming the 90's and 00's premier art rock pioneers. Listening to the two albums back to back, one can scarcely believe they're even the same band. There is a comparison to be made with Tillman Singer, in that Luz is a dull, boring mess of a movie (albeit in a different way than Pablo Honey was), and Cuckoo is a quantum leap forward. Luz's problem comes down to being too impenetrable and in love with being Art For Art's Sake to remember to be a movie too. I'm all for movies not handing you all the answers and keeping you on the back foot with mysteries; movies like 1977's House, Jacob's Ladder, Spoonful Of Sugar, Color Out Of Space, and my personal favorite, Phantasm, all commit themselves to answering a viewer's questions with more questions, but not in an obstructive or antagonistic way. Phantasm, for instance, introduces the villainous Tall Man's henchmen, these robed dwarf-like humanoids. Who are they? Where do they come from? The movie answers that by revealing The Tall Man takes corpses he steals and uses some kind of process to crush the bodies down to half-size, and stores them in weird pod-like containers. That answer then makes the viewer ask why he crushes down corpses, and how does he reanimate them, and why put them in pods, and the answers to those lead to more questions. It's a never-ending spiral of weird, but it feels like world-building. The viewer is constantly asking questions, but never feels locked out of what's going on. Luz can't manage that. Luz, in fact, doesn't want to do that. It is obtuse for the sake of being obtuse. It doesn't use mystery as a way to world-build or create intrigue; it uses mystery as a way to put up a wall between the director and the viewer, purposefully allowing tiny cracks through which we can get a peek at what's going on, but never the whole picture. It doesn't answer a question with a question; it sweeps the first question under the rug in favor of another one, and repeats this process until the end of the movie. This is the kind of Artifice Before Art movie that adds fake film grain and thinks that somehow sets a mood. That's really what Luz depends on: mood. It isn't interested in telling a story so much as creating an atmosphere, and while it does set an atmosphere, it's one that is more stand-offish than creepy, bewildering instead of mysterious. It's the kind of movie some stuffy critic that graduated from Columbia would insist has deep meaning and layers and profound depth. I'm no Columbia graduate. I'm just a regular guy. I like a movie that can keep me guessing, but not when the movie is intentionally designed to confuse, and seems to delight in doing so without providing any sense of relief. I'm hoping that Tillman Singer's career trajectory continues to map to Radiohead's, because that means the next movie will be a bonafide classic, and we can put this movie in the bin as an awkward curiosity and nothing more.