Luz (2025 film)

LUZ
Theatrical poster
Traditional Chinese	花明渡
Jyutping	Faa1 Ming4 Dou6
Directed by	Flora Lau
Written by	Flora Lau
Produced by	Flora Lau Yvette Tang Joseph Sinn Gi Chan Stephen Lam
Starring	Isabelle Huppert Sandrine Pinna Guo Xiaodong Huang Lu David Chiang Deng Enxi
Cinematography	Benjamín Echazarreta
Edited by	Denis Bedlow Fernando Epistein Flora Lau
Music by	Mimi Xu
Running time	102 minutes
Countries	China Hong Kong
Languages	Mandarin Cantonese French English

Luz (Chinese: 花明渡, stylized as LUZ) is a 2025 Hong Kong film directed, produced, and written by Flora Lau. It is Lau's first film since Bends in 2013. The film follows two plots respectively set in Paris and Chongqing: a woman distanced from her stepmother and a man trying to get closer to his daughter.

The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2025 in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition category.

Synopsis

The film follows the lives of two people. Wei searches for his estranged daughter, Fa, throughout Chongqing, and Ren, a gallerist in Hong Kong, contends with her stepmother, Sabine, who lives in Paris. The two eventually meet in a virtual reality world.

Critical reception

Carlos Aguilar of Variety praised Luz for its "dazzling, otherworldly frames" of Chongqing's cityscape and its "mesmerizing" virtual reality realm, but noted that it lacks emotional depth and a compelling narrative beyond its "seductive stylization", ultimately failing to explore the questions of familial disconnection in a "meaningful" way. Drew Burnett Gregory of Autostraddle also found the film to be "formally enchanting", highlighting the clever overlapping of the real world and the video game, which creates a sense of "heightened rapture" that captures the characters' sadness and longing, even if the dialogue sometimes lacks the same finesse as the film's visual style.

Anzhe Zhang of Slant Magazine, giving the film 2.5/4 stars, observed a "lack of emotional details in the film’s character arcs, which both end in understated and abrupt ways" but lauded the film's use of virtual reality as a means of establishing connection and raising questions about "modern intimacy and alienation." Elizabeth Weitzman of TheWrap wrote that Lau's script occasionally felt "black-and-white in its themes... we do notice when she laps into clichéd terrain"; however, the reviewer also lauded Lau's visuals and sense of mounting anticipation throughout the film.

Beandera July of IndieWire gave the film a C+, describing it as an ambitious project that "raises more questions than it yet knows how to answer", and while it features "lush" visuals and a strong mise-en-scène, it ultimately feels "largely an intellectual exercise" that suffers from emotional distance and is "more like an underdeveloped proof of concept than a fully realized narrative". Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter also found the film to be an "ambitious experiment" that "jumps between locations and protagonists without much warning", ultimately appreciating its "powerful imagery" and immersive experience, but notes that the real-life narrative is inconvincing, making the film feel more like a "visual piece than a full-fledged feature" that "often strains to create drama". Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com offered another negative review, calling the film "frustrating" and noting that it has "almost nothing to say", as it jumbles its themes and characters in a "desperate need of a focusing rewrite", ultimately making it feel as shallow as the virtual worlds it portrays.