The film Luce, darling of 2019’s London Film Festival is a classic work of American Gothic for a thoroughly modern age.
As a guide to those not spending their second year studying the subject, American Gothic is quite different from its European counterpart. European Gothic is Dracula; castles, curses, crosses and dark hallways. There’s generally a supernatural cause for the disturbing moments, or at the very least enough ambiguity there can be if you squint.
In American Gothic, like Scream, the call tends to come from inside the house.
Luce is no exception on this front. The film focuses on the relationship between Amy and Luce, her adopted son, a brilliant, charming and talented seventeen year old who is expected to achieve incredible things with his life. Within the first half an hour of the film he’s made captain of his sports team, and combined with perfect grades and skilled oration he’s the perfect college package. Even the report which kickstarts a chain of explosively catastrophic events achieves a 4.0, a fact which leaves his mother confused as to why she has been called into teacher Harriet Wilson’s office.
Luce, it turns out, chose to write his essay from the perspective of a militant leader. Combine that with illegal fireworks being found in his locker, and the mother quickly begins to understand her concerns.
The film is a gruelling one. Traditional Gothic fears of hereditary madness blended with scenes of modern police brutality had the audience gasping during one scene, whilst archaic concerns over women’s chastity were modernised with the #MeToo movement. Issues of race, gender and family are ferociously battled between the film’s leads, and the soundtrack is unbearably tense at points, as are the decisions made by both parents to overlook the rational to protect their son.
One trope subverted however, is that of the changeling. Luce is not the soulless cuckoo in a good God-fearing nest common in works of literature, he’s an unusually sympathetic and human character, whose frequent bouts of running are a telling motif. Luce is training himself, seeking the best times, the best abdominal muscles, the best version of himself he’s capable of. He’s also outrunning a traumatic childhood as a child soldier- adopted at the age of seven having already seen scarring horrors- and exhausting himself in the process.
A pivotal scene is shot from one of the seats facing the stage. The film’s audience views the podium in the same way the actual audience would see it during one of his speech rehearsals, and watches him cry whilst preparing an anecdote about his parents. This shot is one of the film’s most unsettling moments, as it both breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly and places the viewer as voyeur to a moment of genuine emotion. It caused me to question myself in the pin-drop silence of a dark theatre; despite all the evidence displayed, was there really any crime on his part? Was it a young man who’d made mistakes he couldn’t outrun, or was it even the vicious vendetta his teacher was accused of?
Like any good work of Gothic fiction, Luce haunts.