High in the Alps live the reclusive Maria (Susanne Jensen) and her grown son, Johannes (Franz Rogowski).  Fleeing to their “Eden” when Johannes was just a boy, he has been sheltered from the world and still has the faculties and comprehension of a child.  His only form of education – or rather, indoctrination – comes from his fanatical mother who credits Jesus for her own sobriety and pledges the lives of her and her son to her God in thanks.  When a ski company begins to survey the land for a new resort, they bring with them the evil forces from the world left behind by the mother and son, threatening an irreparable disruption to their meager existence.  

Luzifer is a bleak character study written and directed by Peter Brunner and released in the USA by Mubi.  Loosely based on a true story, the film explores the effects of when an extremist view of religion is allowed to fester in a closed society and in that way is very similar to Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012) which chronicled the fatal exorcism on a young woman in a convent in Moldavia.  While Beyond the Hills has an arguably more fleshed-out and traditional script, both films share expert performances and production design.  That being said, Luzifer is presenting a much more unconventional version of its exorcism tale by exploring a narrative arc that finds its characters, in the extreme pursuit of purity and piousness, become the devil themselves.  They are possessed by their own ideas and as they beat against the self-imposed prison walls of their thoughts, they begin to dismantle and destroy themselves.   

A two-hander between Jensen and Rogowki, the two do quite well in easing audiences into their bizarre interpretation of faith.  From the start, there is plenty of Christian imagery at play from crucifixes to snake carvings and the wide, majestic wings of Arthur, Johannes’ pet eagle.  The problem with the film starts just as quickly, however, because the relationship between the mother and son is so disturbed and depraved that, while intentionally so, it keeps audiences at arm’s length.  Maria, ironically named, is not unlike Mrs. White from Stephen King’s Carrie who also uses the threat of religion to instill fear and control over her child.  The major difference here is that Johannes is so developmentally behind that this abuse which he suffers feels so much more heinous to witness.    

For all the revolting plot elements in Luzifer that make it a difficult film to watch, the imagery in the film is nothing but beautiful.  With the benefit of the majestic Alps as its setting, Peter Flinckenberg’s cinematography expertly captures the mist and the mud which only helps to highlight the lush greenery in which the mother and son live.  Coupled with Tim Hecker’s unsettling score and the buzzing sound design of the survey drones’ whirring motors, it becomes an overwhelming and captivating experience for the senses.  Artistically, Luzifer is a film that is firing on all cylinders and the entirety of the craft departments are working towards that singular vision which results in a stunning work of art on a technical level. 

It is a shame, then, that the messaging behind the film is so muddied.  The gut reaction – and the simplest, dime-a-dozen reasoning – is that the film wields modernity as a weapon that threatens the pair’s lifestyle, but as the plot unfolds it becomes clear that modern thinking would solve many of their problems and save them a lot of strife.  But the enemy ideals of the film are not just modern technology.  Arguments can be made that religious fanaticism, corporate greed, and the destruction of nature are all the enemy, but with such a large army of antagonists, the final act becomes almost indecipherable.  It is too clumsily written to call it a perfect storm of circumstance, but what can be said is that the film is very clearly trying to say something, however, the message gets lost in the film’s ambition to comment on everything. 

Ambitious is probably one of the best words to describe Luzifer.  While it is a small film, its stakes are life and death, straight from the beginning.  And not just physical life, but spiritual life, too.  Its thorny narrative does little favors in it finding an audience as it takes those motifs from many cult stories and pushes them to the absolute extreme interpretation. The main arc contains a perversely beautiful tragedy but in a scene-by-scene examination of the film, it becomes an increasingly unsettling sit.  Thankfully, the craft behind the camera and in the edit elevate the work and can act as a salve to what we are seeing on the screen, but the dressing itself is not enough to fix the errors on the slightly confused and unfocused script. Even with two incredible and committed performances from Jensen and Rogowski, Luzifer is hard to classify as an effective narrative, rather it is one that presents a sequence of ideas and feelings and puts the onus on the audience to make it all make sense.