Luz: The Flower of Evil is a Colombian film that blends lushly filmed nature, tons of imagery, religious obsession, and broken innocence. It’s a film that sits somewhere between folk horror, skewed fairy tale, and coming of age drama. It’s been sold as an art-house horror film, though I don’t see that, as the story is relatively linear, the flow of the whole thing is fairly conventional, and there’s nothing too deep, cryptic, or arty going on here. From Fractured Vision here’s a new Blu Ray release- bringing together a commentary track, a few other extras, and art cards.

Luz: The Flower of Evil appeared in the year 2019, and since has gained a fair bit of praise- both from critics and horror fans in general. It was written and directed by Manizales, Colombia born Juan Diego Escobar Alzate, and this is the one and only feature film he’s helmed thus far, though he made twelve or so shorts. On paper, and after the praise I’d seen lumped on the film, I should have loved Luz: The Flower Of Evil. There is no doubt there is talent in both the films creation and it’s acting, but sadly I came away from the whole thing feeling more than a little let down, and to be honest, I got more than a little bored/tired by the cliches, and it’s trying to be arty/ meaningful touches that are edged through-out the film.
 
The film is set on the lush green and thickly forested mountains of Colombia, focusing on a community-led by an unbalanced preacher named El Seño (Conrado Osorio). He lives in a wooden hut with his very innocent and world naïve twenty-something daughter and two late teen girls he has taken in. A wide-eyed and blond boy child is brought into the centre of the village, he’s tired at the neck and El Seño tells his followers the boy is Jesus. And the film charts the preachers slow falling apart and the girls coming of age.
 
From the off, and the wonderful shot and lit footage of green and lush nature, bones, peaceful waterways, and a tape recorder playing classic music in nature- it’s clear they have a great camera crew on board. And as we move on the imagery and how its film is spot on, at points hyper-real. This I’m afraid is one of the few positives, the other is the acting which is largely good.
 
Moving onto the negatives here, and boy where to begin…. firstly the plotting and telling of both the unhinged preacher and coming of age stories are done in a deeply predictable and tiresome manner. Next, we get a shed load of cliched folk horror imagery- we have trying to look creepy goats, slow drifting shots of scattered bones, meant to be ominous woodland shots, ranting and sweaty bearded men, etc. We have  The Village like sub-plot with a tape recorder, which goes nowhere interesting. There is zero tension and no real feeling of dread or horror fed mood anywhere. Lastly, the whole thing seems to slowly but surely limp along, with it feeling a lot, a lot longer than its one-hour forty-minute runtime. To be honest, I can’t recall feeling so let down, underwhelmed by a film in quite sometimes…maybe that’s down to the hype and praise given to it, or maybe it’s simply because it's a lovely looking, but ultimately rather empty and predictable film, which is so tiresome in its folk horror tropes.
 
Apparently, the Blu Ray features commentary with director and film critic Kurt Halfyard, an hour making of, and doc charting it’s playing at Sitges film festival. I can’t comment on any of these, as we were sent just a film only on-line screener- which is a way in a pity, as it would have been interesting to hear a bit about the making of/ how the film came about. Sure I didn’t really enjoy the film, but sometimes extras can open up/ help one appreciate a film more, and it’s always interesting to hear about the making of films.
 
On the whole Luz: The Flower of Evil was a huge, huge let-down- swimming in cliches, and featuring a dull/ lulling unfold and predictable plot flow. I guess if you do enjoy either folk horror, or the post horror genre, maybe give it ago…but it really didn’t wash with me.