Luana Velis in Luz (Screen Media)

Tilman Singer’s lean yet effectively creepy horror film opens with a young woman, Luz,  (Luana Velis) a somnambulist who wanders into a police station and inexplicably shouts profanities. In a dive bar across town, a mysterious beauty (Julia Riedler) sidles up to a clinical psychiatrist (Jan Bluthardt) and starts telling him about a past girlfriend, who was expelled from a Catholic high school for performing a pagan rite. The two plotlines converge, but this story about a demon that has followed its prospective bride through the years—and is now looking to claim her—is ultimately less compelling than how the director chooses to tell it.

During the initial scenes, Singer repeatedly establishes the mundane rhythms of settings before introducing a sinister element and letting the tension build slowly from there. The truly bravura act is the second, featuring an extended interrogation involving Luz, the psychiatrist, and a pair of police detectives who believe Luz, a cabbie, might be responsible for the disappearance of a wealthy tourist last seen in her taxi. Placed under hypnosis, she flashes back to the recent past as elements of her memories bleed into the present day. The camera, however, never leaves the enclosed space she shares with her questioners, an aesthetic choice that draws us further in without offering release from the claustrophobia.

Singer is clearly adept at creating atmosphere, and there is more than a little David Cronenberg influence visible in the way he distorts the human body to disturbing effect. To indicate demonic possession, a light shines out of a character’s mouth or the eyes are completely painted over in black-and-white, which, combined with how Singer tends to either frame his principals with their heads slightly tilted or to focus on the victims’ horrified reactions, proves subtle and highly effective. While Luz is hardly bloodless and includes a sequence of self-mutilation that is tough to watch, the worst violence is implied more than explicit.

As far as the performances, Bluthardt combines intensity and intellect in a manner reminiscent of a young Rutger Hauer, while Riedler conveys a sexual voraciousness that is alluring and dangerous. By contrast, Velis as Luz is occasionally overwhelmed by the histrionics of her co-stars and isn’t helped by her slightly underwritten role. Though we eventually get past the character’s tough outer shell to her innermost dark secrets, she is a surprisingly passive passenger, though she shifts at the very end.

Along with hearkening back to Cronenberg, there are also shades of horror maestros Dario Argento and John Carpenter (in the form of gauzy demon-summoning sequences and a moody synthesizer score, respectively) and enough original touches for Luz not to be considered entirely derivative. As debuts go, it’s impressive overall, and we may very well look back on it as the starting point of an exciting directorial career.