When the Devil Goes to Art School
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if The Exorcist were remade by an experimental German film student armed with a VHS camcorder, a crate of cigarettes, and a deep love of analog synths, congratulations — your unholy wish has been granted. Luz (2018), the debut feature by Tilman Singer, is that strange miracle: a supernatural horror film that feels both possessed and painfully hip.
At just over 70 minutes, Luz is what happens when someone traps a demon inside an art installation. It’s a hypnotic, claustrophobic, and darkly funny experience that somehow manages to make minimalism feel maximal. If your idea of a good time involves demonic hypnosis, cryptic dialogue, and lighting so moody it should be prescribed antidepressants, you’re in for a treat.
Plot? A Suggestion, Really
Let’s get this out of the way: Luz has a plot, technically speaking, but it treats storytelling like a Ouija board — something to toy with, not trust.
Our heroine, Luz Carrara (Luana Velis), is a taxi driver who stumbles into a police station after a car crash, bleeding, dazed, and muttering in Spanish about some “ancient evil.” The police, showing the efficiency one expects in possession cases, call in a psychiatrist, Dr. Rossini (Jan Bluthardt). Unfortunately, Rossini is about as stable as a broken crucifix.
Through hypnosis, we learn that Luz accidentally summoned a demon years earlier while attending a religious school — because of course she did. The demon has followed her ever since, and in one of cinema’s more audacious power moves, it decides to possess the doctor mid-interrogation. That’s when things really get strange — or stranger, depending on how many German expressionist films you’ve seen.
The Devil Wears Corduroy
Director Tilman Singer’s aesthetic is pure, unfiltered retro fever dream. Shot on 16mm film, Luz looks like it crawled out of a haunted arthouse theater that hasn’t been cleaned since 1983. The image is grainy, the soundtrack buzzes like a cursed synthesizer, and the editing feels like it was done during an exorcism.
This is the kind of horror film that doesn’t jump-scare you — it slow-burns into your cerebral cortex until you start questioning your own sanity. Every fluorescent flicker, every offbeat camera angle, every dead-eyed stare contributes to an atmosphere so thick you could spread it on toast.
Singer doesn’t just pay homage to 1980s Euro-horror — he resurrects it. Luz channels the eerie stillness of Dario Argento, the dream logic of Andrzej Żuławski, and the bureaucratic weirdness of Possession and Der Fan. If Suspiria and Twin Peaks had a baby that grew up listening to Kraftwerk, this would be it.
Performances Possessed (In a Good Way)
Luana Velis gives one of those quietly feral performances that stick with you long after the film ends. Her Luz is all haunted eyes and subdued trauma — a woman perpetually one bad séance away from a breakdown. She’s simultaneously fragile and defiant, like someone who’s seen the abyss and told it to take a number.
Jan Bluthardt, as the hapless Dr. Rossini, deserves a special medal for “Most Entertaining Possession by a Male Lead.” Watching him transform from skeptical shrink to demonic marionette is both terrifying and, in a weird way, hilarious. There’s a sly undercurrent of dark humor in how seriously everyone takes the absurd — a very German kind of funny, the kind that makes you chuckle and then immediately question whether you’re okay.
Julia Riedler, playing Nora, provides a perfect counterpoint as the mysterious woman whose motives seem to change every five minutes. She might be friend, foe, or familiar, but in Luz, labels are as slippery as holy water on linoleum.
Bureaucracy and Beelzebub
What makes Luz so uniquely unsettling isn’t the demon — it’s the mundanity surrounding it. Most of the movie takes place in a single drab police interrogation room, which feels less like a set and more like purgatory with fluorescent lighting. The officers aren’t heroic or hysterical — they’re just confused civil servants trying to file paperwork while the supernatural slowly eats their reality.
That’s the film’s secret genius: it treats demonic possession as just another procedural inconvenience. One could almost imagine the German police union drafting a new form — “Section 7B: If demon inhabits psychiatrist, check yes or no.”
The film’s humor, dry as a priest’s martini, seeps through these moments. It’s a slow, deadpan comedy of horrors — Kafka by way of The Exorcist.
The Sound of Damnation
If you stripped away Luz’s dialogue, you’d still know exactly what kind of film it is just from the sound design. The pulsing, minimal synth score by Simon Waskow could resurrect John Carpenter’s mustache from beyond the grave. It hums and drones like a satanic fax machine, amplifying tension without ever resorting to cheap orchestral stabs.
Each creak of a chair, each distant echo in that cold police room, feels intentional — like the building itself is listening. It’s an aural séance, and the audience is the unwilling medium.
Possession as Performance Art
Make no mistake: Luz isn’t a popcorn horror film. There are no teenagers running through the woods, no CGI gore fountains, no final girl wielding a crucifix like a shotgun. Instead, it’s a methodically staged fever dream that demands attention — and rewards it with unsettling beauty.
Singer stages possession like experimental theater. The hypnotism scenes blur reality and hallucination so completely that you start to wonder whether you, too, have been hypnotized. A police officer becomes an unwitting actor, reenacting Luz’s past under trance; the demon speaks through different hosts; the line between performance and reality disintegrates.
By the end, Luz stops being about good versus evil and becomes a meditation on memory, guilt, and the strange comfort of surrender. It’s the rare possession movie that makes you sympathize with both the haunted and the haunting.
A Thesis Film That Graduated with Honors
It’s astonishing to remember that Luz began life as Tilman Singer’s film school thesis. Most student films involve bad sound, blurry camerawork, and an overreliance on symbolism involving rain. Singer instead delivered a meticulously crafted nightmare that feels like it escaped from a lost 1980s arthouse vault.
The film’s confidence borders on arrogance — it knows exactly what it wants to be, and it refuses to explain itself. But that’s part of its charm. In an era where horror films love to spell out every metaphor, Luz invites you to get lost in the ambiguity. It’s horror for people who like their demons with a side of existential dread and German minimalism.
Final Verdict: Luz Shines in the Dark
Luz is a strange, hypnotic gem — a 70-minute séance that proves you don’t need a big budget to make a film that crawls under your skin and redecorates your subconscious. It’s funny, unsettling, and strangely elegant — the kind of horror that doesn’t scream at you, but whispers your name in a language you didn’t know you understood.
If David Lynch and Werner Herzog decided to co-direct an exorcism in a police station, the result might look something like this. It’s not for everyone — casual horror fans might find it slow or obtuse — but for those who enjoy cinematic weirdness done with conviction, Luz is divine possession at its finest.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5 Hypnotized Taxi Drivers.
It turns out the devil doesn’t always appear in fire and brimstone — sometimes, he wears a lab coat, smokes a cigarette, and speaks perfect German.
