THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Guillaume Nicloux does not make films like everyone else. At 56, this director likes nothing more than experimentation and provocation. The taste for monsters and the scorched, the hatred of uniformity constitute the standard behind which, cultivating in their company the taste for friendship and the contempt for lukewarmness, he leads a few big names, from Jean-Pierre Darroussin to Michel Houellebecq, via Gérard Depardieu. We see the topo. Mouths and mouths, a surreal line that can quickly turn sardonic, uncomfortable, even ignominious. A French tradition in short, better, a style, which joins Robert Le Vigan to Jean-Pierre Mocky.
In Tower, not the shadow of a star, and a genre, horror, which Nicloux had never rubbed shoulders with until now, even though it is never completely absent from a work that plays with the limits. Strictly speaking – and this is what is so appealing in this film – the fantastic element itself stems from a minimalism that borders on a conceptual bet.
Consider, around the tower of an unidentified city, a black mass which seems to have devoured everything. Nothing can be distinguished outside in the darkness; worse, it is no longer possible to leave or risk disappearing, destroying body and property, in turn. The dark matter of Nicloux is equivalent in this sense to The thing, by John Carpenter (TheThing, 1982), which manifests itself only through its monstrous effects on a human group immobilized by circumstances.
twilight of humanity
It remains to unfold the story, which, no less somberly, the filmmaker tackles over a period of a few years. Once the inhabitants are convinced that no escape exists, the era of internal organization takes over from the supernatural commotion, and very quickly branches off into a story of survival. We would be talking about strategy if, faced with its radical isolation, human society did not immediately adopt tribal reflexes. Whites with Whites. Blacks with Blacks. Arabs with Arabs. Almost. A long involution begins. Clan organization of groups. Submission to brute force. Trafficking of all kinds, dogs, cats, humans. Corruption attempts in enemy clans. Brutal and merciless attacks.
As time passes, insalubrity sets in, cannibalism becomes a recourse, primitive and conspiratorial religions are reborn, bodies and souls are inevitably emaciated, humanity is extinguished. Here comes the age of the caves, no longer as the dawn of humanity, but as its twilight. A character, the young Assitan, will take refuge there safe and sound, having gone through the worst, holding in her lap a totally blended family, waiting for a morning that may never come.
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