PARK CITY – A sporadically interesting though ultimately superficial exploration of online connection, video games, and modern alienation, writer-director Flora Lau’s “Luz” is a film in search of something greater than it is never quite able to grab hold of. It boasts some striking visuals here and there, such as the mythical deer that roams through its digital world, though it squanders them in what proves to be an empty execution lacking in more impactful emotion.
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The film centers on two storylines: that of Wei (Xiaodong Guo), who, when he isn’t spending his lonely days working for a crime boss, is attempting to connect with his daughter Fa (Enxi Deng) from whom he is estranged, and Ren (Sandrine Pinna) as she goes to check on her stepmother Sabine (Isabelle Huppert) who is in somewhat ailing health though doesn’t want to slow down. Both Wei and Ren find themselves drawn into the worlds of LUZ, an online video game built around an iffy use of VR that never quite feels authentic, for their own reasons. The former hopes to find his daughter there, while the latter is driven more by the feeling of escape it provides. Bouncing between the Chinese city of Chongqing, the streets of Paris, and this digital world, “Luz” is then about piecing together how this unreal space means to the reality that the characters struggle to find their footing in. At least, that’s what the film is in theory.
In practice, “Luz” is an oddly constructed experience where the deeper narrative and themes about connection are all broadly alluded to, though never excavated beyond the surface. Each time we think there is something more complex emotionally that we are now getting into, we’ll cut to what feels like the exact conversation playing out or a disconnected sequence in the game that just never grabs hold of you. This is mainly due to the worlds of LUZ, which we mostly see as a bar, a neon-lit city that’s largely empty, or a forest where characters aimlessly wander. Each plays more like a hazy dream without much purpose to any of it except to wander this way and that while vaguely shooting about than it does a place with any potent meaning to explore. It’s all just background noise without anything engaging to find in it.
This could very much be the point in that the virtual worlds we create for ourselves may be just as empty as the ones in reality, but key points near the end hinge on us believing they are all actually transcendent in some way. This is where Huppert, constantly engaging to watch on screen, and the rest of the committed cast end up feeling stranded in these worlds that the film hasn’t done enough to sweep us in. The visual effects, while simple, are serviceable, but the actual story being told is slight to the point of being vacuous. The entire experience of watching it is like trying to hold onto something before it just slips through your hands and is gone forever. While this sounds like it could hit you if played right, “Luz” is too tightly controlled and not ever expansive enough to leave a mark. It’s a game you play and forget immediately after doing so.
This extends to the conclusion, which ends rather abruptly, concluding what was already a fleeting film in a way that leaves little impression. Whether in the real or virtual worlds, the emotional throughline of “Luz” is never something that comes into focus with the clarity that it needs to. You can see the broad strokes, but the final notes it plays about finding something after you stopped looking for it don’t land with the resonance it should when so little care is put into the beats leading up to it. There is a poetic, quite powerful, potential core to what “Luz” is gesturing towards about the online worlds we built to bring us closer together and whether they actually do so. However, it never cuts into this with any conviction. In the end, it reveals itself as a staging of a lived-in world but without any textures to make it so. The more the characters chase after it, the less and less it feels like they’re ever getting anywhere. [C-]
