LUZ
(2024 | Hong Kong / China | 102 minutes | Flora Lau)

From the neon glow of Chongqing to the experimental art galleries of Paris, LUZ strains to connect disparate stories of lonely fathers & daughters through a virtual stag hunt. We enter the fragmented narrative by way of a pair of down-on -their-luck fixers who toil by night for a wealthy nightclub owner (each with their own schemes and regrets). Elsewhere, on a different pole of the socioeconomic spectrum, the story of a young gallerist (Sandrine Pinna) who spends evenings at home immersed in her VR headset unfolds.

While she quests for meaning — or maybe just distraction — among strangers in an online game, her story is paralleled by a remorseful father’s search for his long-estranged daughter. His journey eventually brings him from camgirl livestreams into the realm of multiplayer gaming. Hers takes the opposite course as a daughter dragged back in the real world to reunite with her long-estranged stepmother. The pieces of the two stories intersect and comment on each other, but you can feel that writer-director Flora Lau’s interests in some are stronger than others. Further, a third spur involving an art heist theoretically bridges the two main stories is underdeveloped and quickly abandoned before it ever gets going.

Intentional or not, the game that binds them seems incredibly dull, a multiplayer world where nothing seems to happen yet everyone emerges breathless. Maybe it’s the poor nausea-inducing graphics, rather than the chase for a crystalline deer who’s always out of reach that leaves the players (like the audience) exhausted. Fittingly, then, the film’s most compelling images come when the action shifts to Paris. It’s there that Isabelle Huppert makes a case for being alive in the real world: vaping, dancing, capering, and charging headlong into an icy sea.

Luz played an official selection of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. After additional screenings in-person, it is also available online for the public from January 30–February 2.