Luz: The Flower of Evil

The pro­logue to writer/​director Juan Diego Esco­bar Alzate’s Luz: The Flower of Evil is an impres­sion­is­tic kalei­do­scope of scenes from a wood­land prop­er­ty. We see piles of tim­ber by the foun­da­tions of a new house, a hecatomb of dead cat­tle, a woman rid­ing a horse, blood-stained sheets on a bed, an axe (imprint­ed with the name ​‘Adán’) in a tree stump, a plate of rot­ten corn cobs by a man­a­cle, an old cas­sette play­er (now play­ing, now smashed), a man car­ry­ing a young boy’s body towards four marked graves, and a goat.

Some of these are flash­backs, some flash­for­wards, but togeth­er they point towards some­thing sin­is­ter­ly apoc­a­lyp­tic that both is com­ing, and per­haps has always been there, inscribed time­less­ly in the topog­ra­phy. Mean­while these daylit images have been colour cor­rect­ed to the point of kitschy over­sat­u­ra­tion, all to sug­gest a space that is both myth­ic and hyper­re­al, as if from a fable or fairy tale. Indeed, were it not for the portable tape recorder that ties the film’s events to the mod­ern era, Luz could be set cen­turies in the past.

The nar­ra­tive prop­er begins with that cas­sette play­er, which Laila (Andrea Esquiv­el) is show­ing to her gau­cho father (a very intense Con­ra­do Oso­rio). ​“It’s impos­si­ble that you found this in the woods,” he tells her, ini­tial­ly con­fis­cat­ing the device out of con­cern that the Dev­il may use it to trick his way into their home. But it is too late – Laila has already been seduced by this mirac­u­lous mechan­i­cal ​‘angel’, equal­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by the music that it brings into her life, and by the device’s capac­i­ty to record voic­es includ­ing her own (in a house­hold where she is repeat­ed­ly advised to main­tain silence).

“Every­thing that has to do with God is com­pli­cat­ed,” says the father. Going only by the name ​‘el Señor’ (or ​‘the Lord’), he is self-appoint­ed God of his own domain, as both preach­er and patri­arch in this remote rur­al back­wa­ter of Colom­bia. Although, as a wife beat­er, rapist, child abduc­tor and ser­i­al killer, he is also the Dev­il, and so embod­ies the prin­ci­ple, stat­ed often in the film, that good and evil coex­ist in us all.

He is guardian to three vir­ginal women whom he has des­ig­nat­ed ​‘angels’ – not only his actu­al daugh­ter Laila, but also Uma (Yuri Var­gas) and Zion (Sharon Guz­man) who are not his daugh­ters but live under his roof, his pro­tec­tion and his influ­ence (for rea­sons implied rather than stat­ed). All are griev­ing the loss of his wife – and Laila’s moth­er – the kind­ly Luz, whose name means ​‘light’ and whose death two years ear­li­er has let the dark­ness in.

El Señor con­vinces the three girls and a small local fol­low­ing that times will be bet­ter when the dead tree under which Luz has been buried blos­soms again. But he also tries to con­vince them that a young mute cap­tive (Johan Cama­cho) being kept out­side in chains is the incar­na­tion of Jesus him­self, even as oth­ers start believ­ing that this blonde, blue-eyed boy is a demon.

In fact, this is the fifth boy whom el Señor has kid­napped, enchained and pro­claimed the sav­iour, and peo­ple are start­ing to notice a pat­tern in the behav­iour of a preach­er who arro­gates the voice of God to him­self, only to make ser­i­al pre­dic­tions that come to noth­ing. Mean­while the wood­cut­ter Adán (Jim Muñoz) has his eye on the three angels, and espe­cial­ly on Uma, for rea­sons that are not entire­ly sacred.

Pit­ting God against dev­il, man against woman, devo­tion against scep­ti­cism, the spir­i­tu­al against the mate­r­i­al, mes­sian­ism against mad­ness, and water against fire, Luz: The Flower of Evil is a man­nered para­ble of faith in which the human con­di­tion proves as mys­te­ri­ous (and resilient) as the cycles of nature. Like Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are and Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Alzate’s film con­cerns a closed com­mu­ni­ty torn between pious fanati­cism and more earth­ly desires, and strug­gling to reimag­ine irra­tional real­i­ty through the prism of fun­da­men­tal­ist teachings.

Here it seems that for the promised new world to bloom, God and the father must first be ban­ished, and patri­archy over­turned. The result is a sui gener­is odd­i­ty occu­py­ing its own time and space in the cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse – and a
mirac­u­lous piece of mag­i­cal real­ism, with much shad­ow to off­set the light.

Luz: The Flower of Evil is on dig­i­tal 26 July and lim­it­ed edi­tion Blu-ray 23 August from Frac­tured Visions.