‘LUZ’ Review: Isabelle Huppert Immerses Herself in the Style Over Substance of Flora Lau’s Virtual Reality [B-] – Sundance Film Festival
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Remember in the 2010s when serious auteurs were trying their hands at 3D filmmaking? There were Oscar winners like Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, as well as smaller-scale arthouse experiments like Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language. The trend faded out by the end of the decade, having its last gasps in 2018 with Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old. Today, no one except James Cameron is even thinking about 3D in any serious way… but imagine if Flora Lau had made LUZ in 3D. The opening titles alone, designed by Enter the Void’s title artist Tom Kan, feel like they were designed for the third dimension, with flashy neon signs moving towards the camera. Then there’s the way large chunks of the film are set in a virtual reality game – the subject matter could only benefit from 3D’s immersive qualities. It would be like Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, but, like, good!
It’s funny that virtual reality stories are science fiction only because the technology never took off in the mainstream. The “fiction” isn’t that high quality VR experiences exist (they’ve existed in the real world for quite a while now), but that they’re something the mainstream public cares about (it does not). The corporate push for the “metaverse” a few years ago was a non-starter. Video games and social media are massive cultural forces, but VR is at best a niche hobby. LUZ could easily have been a realistic drama about MMO players – but watching people enter a virtual world is more cinematically exciting than watching people sit at a computer or TV to play a video game. VR persists in cinema because it looks cool.
“It looks cool” is the biggest selling point for LUZ. Cinematographer Benjamín Echazarreta (A Fantastic Woman) captures the beauty in Chinese nightclubs, French beaches, and virtual forests alike. Shifts between the real and virtual worlds play so smoothly that the whole movie takes on a dreamlike nature. LUZ’s second biggest selling point is that it also sounds cool. This is electronic composer Mimu Xu’s first film score, and one hopes she does more in the future. She nails the perfect hypnotic tone (a side note relating to the Sundance online stream: the closed caption descriptions of Xu’s tracks go surprisingly hard in their poetry).
The story, alas, is much less impressive than the style. There’s actually two stories, connected through the titular VR game and through the theme of parents and children reconnecting. Both narrative threads have their moments of interest, carried by good actors, but they’re both underdeveloped and a bit obvious, neither ending up fully satisfactory.
In one plotline, ex-con Wei (Xiao Dong Guo) is searching throughout Chongqing for his estranged daughter Fa (Deng Enxi), who works as a live-streamer and believes her dad to be long dead. After he reveals his identity and freaks her out on stream, Wei looks into LUZ as a way to find Fa. Meanwhile, Ren (Sandrine Pinna) travels from Hong Kong to Paris to reconnect with her terminally ill stepmother Sabine (the legendary Isabelle Huppert). Ren finds nostalgia in the “more real than real life” worlds of LUZ, while Sabine wants to live in the moment for the time she has left and convince her stepdaughter to, in the parlance of the terminally online, touch grass.
At first, the Chongqing story is the more compelling of the two. Wei’s desperation towards a clear goal and propensity towards screwing things up creates a fuller sense of intrigue, and the neon-drenched setting takes fuller advantage of the production’s strength as eye candy. The Paris scenes, in contrast, have a more muted palette, and start off feeling slow and dull in comparison. Yet where Wei’s search comes to drag towards a somewhat underwhelming conclusion, Ren and Sabine’s story of reconnection finds more of an emotional charge. Huppert and Pinna’s performances are all the more impressive considering their characters barely speak each other’s languages (Ren’s forgotten her French, Sabine’s forgotten her Mandarin). An extended dance sequence in the final act plays into the filmmaking’s best dreamlike qualities, while Ren and Sabine’s final scene at the beach offers a sense of waking up.
Ren’s deceased artist father is famous for a painting of an ethereal white deer. A similar deer appears throughout the worlds of LUZ – in as much as the VR game appears to have any specific goal, it’s to find and capture that elusive deer. As you might expect in a film like this, the game is a metaphor, and in the end, a pretty obvious one. But that deer does look cool. Whether LUZ’s style is enough to compensate for its underdeveloped and not particularly original substance will divide audiences, but watching it after a few bigger disappointments at Sundance leaves me feeling charitable. I would be much more emphatic in this recommendation if it were shown in 3D.
Rating: B-
This review is from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival where LUZ had its world premiere. The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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