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

From the neon glow of Chongqing’s puzzle-like cityscape 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 (each with their own schemes and regrets) who toil by night to take care of the unseemly affairs of a wealthy nightclub owner. Elsewhere, on a different pole of the socioeconomic spectrum, we follow the hazy story of a young gallerist (Sandrine Pinna) who spends evenings at home immersed in her VR headset and disappearing from the world around her.

While she quests to find meaning meaning — or maybe just numbing distraction — among strangers in a massively populated online game, her story is paralleled by a remorseful father’s search for his long-estranged daughter. His journey to seek clues to her whereabouts eventually brings him from camgirl livestreams into the realm of multiplayer gaming. Hers takes the opposite course: a daughter who finds herself dragged back in the real world to reunite with her long-estranged stepmother. Although the themes and pieces of the two stories intersect and indirectly comment on each other, 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.

Much of the cinematography is beautiful, depicting vibrant cities and nightlife traversed by these disconnected souls. Conversely, 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 middling quality of the sometimes 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 the mere presence of 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.