In the Flesh: Luz

I’ve seen so few depictions of demonic possession that did anything for me. Sure there’s The Exorcist’s putrid, profane Regan, Raimi’s gleefully repulsive Deadites, the malignant mote of wandering light in Hereditary, but in the main horror movies are content to stop at “evil”. Not so for Tilman Singer’s Luz, which makes of its demon a sort of dreamlike braid of possessions woven across time, bodies and consciousnesses bleeding together in a causal loop, the minds of the possessed joined but neither united nor supplanted by the intelligence seeking to use them to further its own opaque ends. It has the twin virtues of specificity and mystery, lending the movie’s meandering plot a feeling of almost mythic separation from the strict flow of linear reality. The film is as much the demon’s story as it is Luz’s (Luana Velis), with the entity functioning as a metaphorical outgrowth of her childhood deception of her besotted classmate Margarita (Lilli Lorenz). She tricks Margarita into believing she’s been impregnated by a demon, but the ritual she devises brings that same invented demon into being.

Singer shoots the whole thing like a combination stage play and music video, sharply limited in location and cast but stylish in its editing choices, and percussively paced. He lingers on physical gestures, walking us through mundane actions with enough fluidity and energy to keep any of it from feeling rote. The physical rhythms the film teaches us to watch for and derive our sense of pacing from also function as an effective way for Singer to push us into the physicality of his characters. The dermatitis around Luz’s throat from being strangled with her own necklace, her restless energy as she mimes shifting gears in her cab in hypnosis therapy, the gender dysphoric preening and dislocation of Dr. Rossini (Jan Bluthardt) after his possession; it all serves to pull us deeper into the physical reality of the film, which has an obvious and encompassing interest in sensuality. Its focus on wounds, its close attention to characters’ attitudes toward their bodies; there is a satisfying fleshliness to it all.

A thread of queer desire gradually emerges from the tangled skein of story elements in play. Margarita and Luz’s adolescent games of blasphemous sexuality usher the demon into being just as they kick off the events of the film. Viewed through this prism, the demon’s journey back to Luz across time and consciousness can be seen as one of self-discovery, the creation of an Other to dissect and comprehend the self. When the kiss between Luz and Margarita finally comes, it’s no longer just a kiss but the closing of a circle, the manifestation of their childhood games in the frightening and sometimes violent world of adulthood. And as the demon comes to know itself and its purpose through the realization of that latent desire, the film is completed, its own reason for existence struck like a tuning fork against the enigmatic truth within its murky timeline and disoriented characters.