An overtly arthouse folk horror film in which barely anything of consequence happens. Luz is a Colombian movie about a preacher (Conrado Osorio) who lives with his three adult daughters (Yuri Vargas, Sharon Guzman, and Andrea Esquivel) leading a small commune in the wilds. He runs it as a cult with guns, bluster, and eschatological rants.
It's a great looking film - the color correction so integral to it that the company that did it (wemakecolor) gets two separate entries during the title credits; Kudos to them and art director Hugo Blandon. The saturated tones and exaggerated grain are somewhere between a film from the sixties and a fever dream. The premise is initially intriguing, as well: the script makes an attempt to lay out some themes and puzzles out for the viewers to put together.
But the film has a terminal case of focusing on the visuals and opaque pronouncements, mostly from the father; endless, shallow mystical ramblings. It's counterpointed by a running narration from one of the girls that fails to shed any light on her internal life and mostly ended up reminding me of You Won't Be Alone... A comparison that could only hurt this movie.
Things do eventually happen, but they mostly escalate to people histrionically screaming at each other, or result in near random actions that don't really lead anywhere. Early on one of the daughters finds a cassette player, and the preacher warns her that the devil likes wearing beautiful disguises; That setup ends up with an unintentionally very funny scene that tries to milk tension and imply satanism on a girl knitting in the woods to reedy, easy listening classical music. Which is a pretty funny portrayal of the fundamentalist mindset, I guess, but that's not really how it comes across. Especially when you factor in the (very cute) demonic goat and creepy whispers.
It's very much a movie about the evils of patriarchal religion, though writer/director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate has the grace to muddy up the waters a little and add what at least could be interpreted as an actual supernatural menace. It's hard to care about anyone involved, though - for all its breathy dialog the movie fails to sketch out any worthwhile characters, and the almost random nature of the events make it near impossible to give a shit about where things are ultimately headed.
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