Luz (2025)

There’s this dance exhibition during the second half of Luz that fascinated me.

I don’t usually get interpretive dance—I enjoy the rhythm, colors, and costumes divorced from any meaning—but this time, things clicked. The urban performance space uses reflective tape to simulate three-dimensional shapes. When the dancer moves and gyrates, our eyes perceive confinement, the lines evoking walls. But of course, these apparent edges are illusions of design, and the artist moves between them, demonstrating the error in our perceptions.

My leap of comprehension is brought to you by the bluntness of Luz, which played in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance this week. Despite so much going on within Flora Lau’s feature, the film underlines its message with the thickest Sharpie it can find. Touch grass, the film implores us. Touch grass.

Certainly, its principal characters would benefit. Wei (Xiaodong Guo) works as a small-time heavy for a billionaire club owner, but he obsesses over a young streamer (Enxi Deng) who happens to be his estranged daughter. After she rebuffs reconciliation, he retreats into Luz, a massive virtual reality game offering hundreds of synthetic worlds. Inside, he chances across Ren (Sandrine Penna), an unsatisfied woman in Hong Kong whose stepmother, Sabine (Isabella Hupert), is dying in France. Luz (the film) follows these characters in and out of Luz (the game), each searching for the elusive something that will make them whole.

As the dance scene suggests, Luz is a film about artificiality. Colorful neon lights bathe indoor settings in unnatural colors. Wei orbits a karaoke bar where patrons pretend to be great singers; Ren visits an art exhibition with Sabine where mounted neon poles illuminate her in radioactive green. There’s a fantastic scene where Wei enters a Luz lounge and walks between the pantomiming players in dark goggles. The place is silent, save for a stray hacking cough or haptic click. It’s eerie to see a glut of people crammed together but invisible to one another.

When Luz rides dancer/composer Mimi Xu’s amorphous score and the digital ambiance of simulated light forward, it excels and begs interesting questions. Wei grapples with the pursuit of his biological daughter, bristling when his would-be girlfriend’s grade schooler calls him “Daddy”; why chase a woman who loathes him when a little girl begs for his paternal affection? Ren is no different: she retreats into Luz in search of purpose, resisting the world at large and stalling her progress. Lau begs us to interrogate what is real and what isn’t, questioning an increasingly digital world and our collective penchant for withdrawing into it instead of, well, touching grass.

Unfortunately, Luz too often adopts the tone of a scolding octogenarian. Huppert’s Sabine gets most of these lines that sound tired and old-fashioned. “Why are you always looking at your phone?” she asks. “You left the show to play a game!” she chastises in another. Point taken—Ren does need to begin living without her goggles—but the lack of nuance rubs me the wrong way. Time and again, Luz exhorts us to go outside and find something real, to not become the art dealer who insists an authentic painting is fake when presented it outside fluorescent club lighting. We watch Sabine on the verge of death, still leaping into the ocean with intentional abandon, and you can hear Luz shouting, “See? See? This is the way!”

 

And…yeah. That’s probably true. We should all spend less time on our phones and playing video games to immerse ourselves in the vital hum of real life a few feet away. By putting her hand so forcefully on the scale, though, Lau compels me to seek balance. My life changed for the better because of connections I found online. Writing for an online audience challenges me intellectually and thrills me creatively. Of course, I need more than that, but Sabine would pluck my phone from my hands to pull me out of the house and into a rainstorm. And I’m allergic to grass.

Plus: the whole Luz game didn’t do much for me. Amusingly, I found the real worlds of the film—throbbing clubs, spiral freeways, underground galleries—far more alien than the synthetic forest or downtown Hong Kong “worlds” Ren and Wei enter. There’s a subplot involving a magical deer everybody’s hunting—Lau called it “the key to everything” in her foreword address—but I never found it compelling. In fact, that strand actively frustrated me: if Luz had been out long enough to become ubiquitous, somebody’s solving the deer! Novices crack Pokémon’s code within days of release. The Ready Player One model of “nObOdY’S fIgUrEd It OuT” is one step too far for me to buy into.

Don’t get me wrong: I like Luz. If it finds US distribution, I’ll see it in theaters in case it lands differently or the big screen conveys its digital visuals better than my TV.

But I suspect my enjoyment of Lau’s film has a firm ceiling. Too often, Luz became one of those glowing tape boxes Xu danced in front of, attempting to force my perspective toward touch grass territory. I knew it was fake, but it still felt claustrophobic, which is different than enlightening.