The film’s greatest strength is its refusal to explain or psychoanalyze its protagonist. We never learn Lulu’s “real” name, her origins, or why she possesses a near-pathological need to be desired. Nevejan cleverly inverts the male gaze that has historically defined the character. Instead of objectifying Lulu, the camera often lingers on the men who orbit her—the aging publisher Dr. Schön (a reptilian Gijs Scholten van Aschat), his weak-willed son Alwa (Benja Bruijning), the cloying artist Schigolch (Pierre Bokma)—as they project their fantasies onto her blank canvas. The film asks not “What is wrong with Lulu?” but “What is wrong with a world that simultaneously worships and punishes female desire?”

★★★★ (4/5) Recommendation: For viewers of Christine (2016), Under the Skin (2013), and Possessor (2020). Not recommended for those seeking a straightforward literary adaptation.

Nevejan’s Lulu is not a period piece. While Wedekind’s plays were set in a fin-de-siècle Germany of bourgeois hypocrisy, this adaptation thrusts Lulu into the hyper-commodified world of contemporary Berlin’s art and nightlife scene. The opening shot—a grainy, handheld close-up of Lulu (played with mercurial intensity by rising star Hanna van Vliet) applying blood-red lipstick in a strobe-lit club bathroom—immediately signals the film’s departure from tradition. This is not the silent, doll-like Lulu of Louise Brooks; nor is it the operatic, mythic figure of Alban Berg. Nevejan’s Lulu is a millennial creature of social media, designer drugs, and precarious freelance gigs.

The film’s centerpiece is a twenty-minute single-take sequence set in a sprawling, abandoned warehouse rave. Here, Lulu, having fled to London, sells herself not for money but for the fleeting illusion of control. Van Vliet delivers a tour-de-force performance, her face cycling through terror, ecstasy, exhaustion, and defiance as the bass thunders. It is in this descent that Nevejan makes her boldest statement: Lulu’s infamous death at the hands of Jack the Ripper is not shown as a grisly spectacle. Instead, the final scene cuts from the warehouse door to the white room, where Lulu finally stops scrubbing. She looks directly into the camera, her expression unreadable—triumphant or annihilated? The screen goes black. The title card reads: “I am Lulu.”