Lulz and Luz at the Soho Hor­ror Film Fes­ti­val 2018

The hor­ror genre some­how man­ages to be both main­stream and niche. This is why it is increas­ing­ly found lurk­ing at the mar­gins of gen­er­al­ist fes­ti­vals, while also strut­ting less abashed­ly at the cen­tre of a num­ber of genre-spe­cif­ic events. In the UK, these com­prise an annu­al rota­tion of Fright­Fest, Grimm­fest, Cel­lu­loid Screams, Aber­toir, addi­tion­al Fright­Fests, as well as numer­ous oth­er minifests, hap­pen­ings and one-off events – all cater­ing to the insa­tiable tastes of hor­ror fans while show­cas­ing work from an ever-expand­ing, occa­sion­al­ly exquis­ite cor­pus of low-bud­get and indie unnervers. And now there is a new kid on the chop­ping block, the Soho Hor­ror Film Fes­ti­val, which recent­ly enjoyed its inau­gur­al edi­tion in the bijou base­ment cin­e­ma of the Kar­ma Sanc­tum Hotel on War­wick Street.

Here, over two tight-packed days, 12 fea­tures and even more shorts (each care­ful­ly matched in theme to the accom­pa­ny­ing fea­ture) were screened, all under the fas­tid­i­ous and eclec­tic cura­tion of pro­gram­mer Mitch Har­rod. The regen­dered trope-twist­ing hilar­i­ty of Lau­rel Vail’s What Met­al Girls Are Into and Ilja Rautsi’s Helsin­ki Mansplain­ing Mas­sacre were the stand­outs in what was a very strong show­case of shorts, while among the most enjoy­able fea­tures were Trevor Stevens’ edu­ca­tion satire-cum-west­ern Rock Steady Row, Mike Testin and Matt Mercer’s mad­cap Demen­tia Part II, Luke Jaden’s fam­i­ly haunter Boo!, and Pavel Khvaleev’s ele­giac apoc­a­lypse Invo­lu­tion. But the high­light of the week­end was Tilman Singer’s Luz, which head­lined a spe­cial Queer Fears Gala also includ­ing three LGBTQ short films.

Bloody and in a daze, cab dri­ver Luz Car­rara (Lua­na Velis) walks into a Ger­man police sta­tion and gets her­self a can from the drinks machine, entire­ly unno­ticed. After all, as a for­eign, work­ing class woman, Luz is prac­ti­cal­ly invis­i­ble, the kind of per­son who would hard­ly cap­ture anyone’s atten­tion. Although there is some­one whose eye she has caught, some­one who yearns deeply for her, some­one who will go to great lengths to engi­neer anoth­er date with the young woman. The recep­tion­ist at the sta­tion, how­ev­er, does not even reg­is­ter Luz’s pres­ence until she starts rav­ing at him in Span­ish like a woman pos­sessed and he can no longer ignore her.

Mean­while, in a cock­tail bar on the oth­er side of town, con­sult­ing psy­chi­a­trist and psy­chother­a­pist Dr Rossi­ni (Jan Bluthardt) has an increas­ing­ly drunk­en con­ver­sa­tion with the strange Nora Van­derkurt (Julia Riedler). After she tells Rossi­ni a pecu­liar sto­ry about the ​“very spe­cial gift” of her girl­friend Luz, whom she had first met in a Chilean Catholic girls’ school and just this very night chanced upon again in Luz’s cab, Nora asks for Rossini’s ​“ther­a­peu­tic sup­port”. Rossi­ni is then called in to inter­view the dis­turbed Luz.

Rossini’s hyp­nother­a­peu­tic ses­sion with Luz unfolds in a dull police con­fer­ence room, in the pres­ence of Com­mis­sion­er Bertillon (Nad­ja Stübiger) and the Span­ish trans­la­tor Olarte (Johannes Benecke). But as Rossi­ni gets Luz to reen­act her var­i­ous encoun­ters with Nora, the rad­i­cal role play that ensues caus­es iden­ti­ties to merge (and emerge), and sto­ries set years apart to over­lap and blur, with one par­ty strug­gling to take con­trol of the inter­view and to com­mu­ni­cate a truth that none present can at first see. It is an intense closed-room psy­chodra­ma, dri­ven by the pow­ers of sug­ges­tion, pro­jec­tion, trans­fer­ence – and by some­thing else, beyond the con­fines of police pro­ce­dur­al or psy­chi­a­try, even tran­scend­ing gen­der, cul­ture and the lim­its of the phys­i­cal body.

There is, buried deep with­in Luz, a type of nar­ra­tive recog­nis­able from hor­ror, but Singer has inge­nious­ly reverse-engi­neered this, trans­form­ing it into both a psy­cho­log­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion of past trau­ma, and an unusu­al love sto­ry, as two lost souls seek each oth­er out across time and space in search of eter­nal, lib­er­at­ing union. The dev­il is in the detail, but unrav­el­ling it requires see­ing through a lot of lit­er­al smoke and mir­rors, and tra­vers­ing the film’s dis­ori­ent­ing use of space and sound­scape to its stripped-down, almost Brecht­ian core of genre. The com­bi­na­tion of blank long shots and eerie, irra­tional events is a lit­tle rem­i­nis­cent of the works of Kiyoshi Kuro­sawa (espe­cial­ly the mes­mer­ic Cure). But Luz is its own thing, recast­ing and (con)fusing sto­ries to work its way deep inside you. Judg­ing by this con­fi­dent­ly creepy fea­ture debut, I can­not wait to see what Singer does next.

The Soho Hor­ror Film Fes­ti­val took place 10 – 11 Novem­ber, 2018. For more info vis­it soho​hor​ror​fest​.com