In “Luz”, author-director Flora Lau deepens the viewers in the mysterious world of a simulated reality game of the same name. Located in Chongqing, one of China’s largest cities, film Follows Clean (Sandrine Pinna), a gallerist traveling to Paris to visit his stepmother, Sabine (Isabelle Huppert). Sabine, long divorced from Ren’s father – a successful painter – has recently experienced fainting magic formulas that have landed her in the hospital. Despite her serious health problems, she takes a Laissez-Faire strategy and instead focuses on launching her new gallery. At the same time, a parallel intervention occurs like Wei (played by Xiao Dong Guo), a Conman who does dirty work for a rich businessman, spends his off-hour watching his foreign daughter, FA (an XI Deng), livestream her home life on A social network app there followers as he shower her with attention and cash. Too much of the film, the stories of Ren and Sabine and Wei seem to be completely disconnected, but eventually they cross themselves within the virtual reality environment in Luz. This simulated world becomes a playground for their shared “Flower Light Journey” (Huā Míng Dù in Mandarin), where players cross an ethereal forest on an endeavor to chase a deer with the skin so irritating that it looks like a psychedelic hallucination.
“Luz” is very interested in the interaction between so -called real life and the virtual who captivates its ensemble and devotes much of its cinematic energy to performing this multidimensional concept. Lau deserves credit for its ingenuity and shapes something as genre-urgent as virtual reality into a silent, glob-trading drama. But in the end, the film feels more like an underdeveloped proof of concept than a fully realized story. Virtual Reality games are designed to be 3D experiences for a reason. As the ensemble is increasingly drawn into the game and the virtual world takes up more space in their lives, the limits of a two -dimensional frame undermine the multidimensional potential of her concept. It is almost wished that this was a movie designed to be experienced through VR itself.
Visually, the movie is lush, with color palettes of living red and blue and pink and green that reflect the experience of walking through Chongqing’s high cityscape at night. Mise-en-Scène raises chongqing to the role of a character in her own right and gives both literal and figurative color to history. For example, scenes by Wei and his friend who swim in a river, with skyscrapers and smog-are large in the background, a fluid to the real world that contrasts with the simulated.
Cinematically, Lucz is more than just a game; It acts as the film’s structural spine and psyche. It is a space where clean, wei and eventually Sabine and FA confront the things they cannot face in real life. For example, clean is introverted and somewhat isolated when she plays the game from her sofa alone in her apartment. Within Luz, however, she is transformed into a hard warrior, relentless in her hunt for the deer. Wei also embodies a sharp duality. In the waking world he is thick -skinned and emotionally guarded, but in Luz he radiates a childish innocence and ease that rarely surfaces in his everyday life.
While Virtual Reality World is an inventive frame for a movie, it also dilutes the emotional resonance of history. The increased blur between the virtual and real worlds creates a sense of disorientation, which makes viewers uncertain what is real and what is made. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but this ambiguity, although it is conceptually exciting, introduces an emotional distance such as the stable performances of Huppert (Sabine) and Xiao Dong Guo (WEI) cannot completely bridge. As the film progresses, the boundary between Luz and reality becomes increasingly inseparable, which makes it harder to get involved in the characters of the characters.
Towards the end of the film, Lau tries to weave the stories of Ren, Sabine, Wei and FA in the real world through a painting. This cloth, created by Ren’s father, shows a sea of red, blues and small white dots that form a nest around a wounded deer in calm, its dreamy eyes, the viewers dared to look deeper. Shown appearance in the club where Wei works, it is obvious that the painting is beautiful and vibrant, but just like the influence of Luz as a story device, this does not translate into anything catartic in the film itself. But now you realize that “Luz” is largely an intellectual exercise that raises more questions than it still knows how to answer: Is virtual reality real or false? Are the events in the game Luz Authentic? Does it even play? In the end, “LUZ” acts as a dynamic space to process the virtual and how it drives us to redefine reality. Unfortunately, it lacks a banking heart that would delight us to its smartness.
Rating: C+
“Luz” World premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition of 2025 Sundance Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
Want to keep you updated on IndieWire’s movie Reviews And critical thoughts? Subscribe here To our recently launched newsletter, in review by David Ehrlich, where our main film critic and Head Review’s editor rounds off the best new reviews and streaming choices along with some exclusive Musings – all only available for subscribers.
