Luz: The Flower of Evil

A drama set in a closed mountain community, in which three young adult women obey the orders and sermons of their father, a false prophet who tries to protect them from the Devil and his temptations. The film is impressive both visually and in terms of acting, but highly problematic in its content and cursed in a pile of metaphors and symbols that are hard to understand; they only have to be interpreted, and it is difficult to say whether the director himself is lost in them. The film works as a critical reflection on faith, God, the Devil, and the damage and evil atrocities that religious faith can do if one succumbs to it, but for its entire runtime it just shows variations on the same idea. With a very gradual gradation, the film piles on itself various ambivalent and multi-meaningful events, while the viewer keeps waiting for the point, which never comes. One of the characters in the film says that things that concern God are complicated. Which is true, but they could also at least be a little bit lively, and we should also be able to understand their basic aspects. (10/07/2019)

A family in the Colombian countryside. In the woods they find a cassette recorder with eternal batteries and a recording of Mozart, in the goat’s pen they find a silent, detachedly staring Aryan boy... and a Terrence Malick-style meditation on the connection with nature and God and the Devil begins. Luz is packed with scenes and thoughts about everything and nothing that may or may not mean something and may or may not be related. In the theater, I was sat in the row right behind the film’s creators and seeing how thoughtfully and with utmost seriousness they watched their work while other viewers were rising from their seats and leaving was even more bizarre than the film itself. Further proof of the Bible’s importance to humanity. One star for those nice image compositions. [Sitges FF] (10/07/2019)