‘Luz’ Review: Crazed and Confused

“Luz,” the first feature from the German director Tilman Singer, is both an experimental take on demonic possession and a bafflingly avant-garde psychodrama. The first is marginally easier to follow than the second.

Spare and surreal, Singer’s story circles a dazed young Chilean taxi driver, Luz (Luana Velis), who enters a German police station to yell, in Spanish, at the receptionist. Next we’re in a near-deserted bar, where the menacingly seductive Nora (Julia Riedler), is making moves on a half-drunk psychiatrist (Jan Bluthardt) while recounting her disturbing brush with Luz in Chile. Repairing to the bathroom, the barflies engage in some kind of psychic transference ritual that leaves her bleeding and him vibrating like a tuning fork. So much for happy hour.