A cabbie walks into a police station, and what happens next is not a joke. The tomboyish driver is Luz (featuring-debuting Luana Velis), and she has flung herself out of her car in the dead of night because she is being pursued by a demon. It happens.

How do authorities handle such a situation? In the case of Luz, the first feature from writer/director Tilman Singer, hypnosis. Under the subconscious-tapping care of Dr. Rossini (Jan Bluthardt, also feature-debuting, in a go-for-broke performance that elicits chills and chuckles), Luz recreates the events that brought her to the station. They are not without merit.

Luz is being sold as a horror movie in the mold of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and David Cronenberg. While their influence on Singer can be glimpsed, the pitch may be doing a disservice to the German film in setting audience expectations it cannot possibly meet. Those primed for a possession thriller filtered through those masters’ lenses will be ill-prepped for a near-somniferous pace that makes the slow-burn style of today’s reigning arthouse-horror hits (e.g., Hereditary, It Follows, The Witch) look positively hasty. On top of that, Singer’s cold visuals, sacrilegious agenda, timeline-tinkering and refusal to fill in all the blanks he’s drawn have the potential to frustrate viewers even further.

However, those viewers are not the kind Singer seeks, as his quasi-experimental, oft-transgressive film capitulates to no one. In scenes drawn out longer than they should play — and even in shots that run for several minutes at a time, resisting any urge to cut away — the nonetheless 80-minute Luz initially appears to bear a thick coat of neophyte pretension. Although hardly ostentation-free, its method comes to reveal a WTF-inducing madness for those still around. Recalibrate expectations and you, too, can be among them. —Rod Lott