The Luzhin Defence (2000) [Blu-ray review]

The Luzhin Defence isn’t another banal chud-splat piece of awards baitriarchy tossed off to satiate the drooling mediocrity porn cravings of your gram-damned relatives and their library book club. No, this is a full-throttle descent into the most infernal kaleidoscopic wormholes of the human psyche – a slipstream rocket-ride strapped to the blown synapses of a transcendental madness so rarified and metaphysical it’ll have you gobbling sheets of industrial-grade blotter acid just to keep up.

It’s a movie…about Chess.

From the moment John Turturro’s neurasthenic grandmaster nutbag first shudders into the frame in a cold sweat of shatteringly neurotic dread, you know you’re in for a level of big brain freakout seldom glimpsed since Kubrick and Burgess used to toke up on their primo sensimilla stashes and spelunk to the outer limits of countercultural cinema. Gorris doesn’t so much submerge us into the cloistered world of underground chess as shove us headlong through the membrane into a disquieting headspace where the game itself becomes a breathlessly taut cathexis and self-annihilating delusion all its own.

Simply put, this movie irradiates with such a abrasive, suffocatingly paranoid metaphysical intensity that you’ll be begging for the sweet release of a heroic nuclear face-melt before the esoteric insanity kicks into its final psychotropic overdrive. Whether it’s Turturro’s afflicted savant vessel twisting himself into baroque knots of social anxiety or Emily Watson’s world-weary voice of unreason goading him into deeper and deeper existential loathing, The Luzhin Defence mainlines you on a heroic syringe shot of psychological trauma and compulsive mania from which you may never recover.

Chess is cool now!

Just the mere act of watching this fractal nightmare spiral from IMAX-level chess grandmaster porn to a shrieking odyssey through the most airless, abject circles of Dante’s harrowing inferno is enough to shake loose your last vestiges of sanity like a flocking rotor blender full of raw elk meat. Layer in the tortuously protracted battle of sexual ideation flaring between our twitching antiheroes and you’re in for a full corkscrewing agonized ordeal akin to getting maced upside the corneas with crystal shiva.

But much like Tarkovsky wrenching his viewers down his famous seven-hour metaphysical tar pits, Gorris handles these obliteratingly heady cosmogonies of the self with a deftly spartan classicism all her own. It’s as if she’s contents to jettison superfluous flesh and let the most brutal existential tenets and esoteric principles of her tortured narrative bleed out until only the crystallized sentience of pure transfixing cinema remains. Every ensorcelling composition and austere rhythm in her directorial arsenal service to jam her gnarly swatch of eccentric personality study through your puny consciousness until its final prismatic obviations reverberate across the very ether of creation itself.

Mental illness and skill intertwine

For me, the churning Wagnerian apocrypha of Turturro’s mental abolition reached a piercing new zenith of psychological derangement during that showstopping pivot where the entire storyline metamorphosized from a burningly intimate character piece into an unprecedented net-cast through the gaping mouth of unfathomable ontological horror. The moment Turturro graduates from misfit weirdo to God’s Own Loneliest Nut – snapping so completely from this mortal plane he somehow achieves the harrowing theoretical physics of throwing chessboard pieces straight THROUGH the void and out into a higher plane of metaphysical ANNIHILATION – I felt my very grey matter incept into a terminal black hole collapse unlike anything I’d previously witnessed outside a Santos freebase blackout.

Like some sentient manifestation of the shrieking high-pitched synesthesia Richard D. James heard when he conceived the Aphex Twin moniker, Turturro’s possession by folkloric Grandmaster mania schismed my last enduring lifeline to everyday spatiotemporal continuity until only a pure singularity of abstractions remained. Usually when filmmakers aspire to shatter the hoary old “subjective experience” metric, the results scan as cheap gimmickry or MFA proselytizing tedium. But when The Luzhin Defence finally crescendos into those God’s eye view shots of Turturro broiling in a synthetic plane of agonizingly crystallized self-obsession, the resulting metaphysical hyper-cubism lobotomizes you of the fourth wall illusion more completely than Dziga Vertov and the Kuchars combined.

John Turturro is on fire!

Every subsequent interiority, from Turturro’s disturbingly arid courtship rituals to the film’s climactic symphonic meltdown of simulated alternate existences, detonates like brain-searing psychotropic phosphorescence straight from the antimatter core of whatever interdimensional delirium deficit produced this warped masterwork. I found myself slipping out of incarnation completely by the time the credits ground-scrawled their way across the screen – a gelatinous protoplasmic smear of former humanness drained of all corporeal definition or dimensional context beyond the pure phenomenological intensity burning behind my occipital napalm factory.

The Luzhin Defence isn’t simply a superior meditation on the agita of mental illness or compulsive dementia, it operates on a much vaster plane as one of the only films to ever adequately simulate the full Gordian koanscape of the chess dimension itself – a mirror realm where the laws of temporal continuity and spatial reasoning are not merely distended but liquefied into unrecognizable eddies of pure alien FORM. Gorris and Turturro together achieve nothing less than a fully immersive synaptic transduction of what it must feel like to exist solely as a sentient node in an infinite transdimensional lattice of combinative abstraction with zero purchase on humanity’s plebian understandings of subjective identity or reality.

Final thoughts on The Luzhin Defence

In that regard, it takes the existential loneliness of Bergman and multiplies it across a quadrillion scorched planes of antipodal alienation from the mortal husk – an esoteric lucidation of everything from Zermelo-Frankel axioms to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems sluiced into a higher rapture of mathematical Kabbalism. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if this seemingly humble psychological character study was one day discovered to be the sublimated lingua franca for some transwarp synaptic collective spanning innumerable brambles of intergalactic metafusion!

So strap in and brace those frontal lobes, cosmically bored, undercraniated angstbuckets – because you’re about to get a plutonian blastwave of Marlene Gorris’ rarefied ontological enlightenment uncurling a transhuman bongload of diamond-sharpened abstractions directly into your remapping neocortex, ars longa, vita brevis and all that junk.

What is on the Luzhin Defence Blu-ray?

The Luzhin Defence Blu-ray features a handful of special features. You get a commentary from director Marleen Gorris and a making-of featurette. Plus, you get a trailer. For a movie that came out 24 years ago and has seemingly been forgotten, that’s a pretty stacked release. But, let’s talk about the A/V Quality.

The 1080p transfer looks pretty sharp for a movie on demand. It’s not quite what you would expect from a recent release. But, for arthouse fare from 2000, it holds up pretty solid. Don’t believe me? Well, go pop open your copy of Wonder Boys and compare it. The DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track is expansive too, but it gets few changes to really pop off. If you’re interested in Chess or deep cuts from Sony Pictures Classics, I would recommend picking it up.

The Luzhin Defence is now available on Blu-ray. Buy a copy at MovieZyng!