Guillaume Nicloux is definitely one of the most known French filmmakers and has made beautiful movies. Nicloux knows how to deal with the same topics while making very different films. Human nature, claustrophobia and the idea of trap were already present, for instance, in his poetic and beautiful VALLEY OF LOVE, with the giants Gerard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert.
His new film takes a clearly different path, with a very different cast and atmosphere. It poses itself as a "horror film" about a post-apocalyptic world in a tower. Well, THE TOWER is not really horror, or at least, we can say it's not as bloody nor gore than horror movies such as SAW or similar films.
This is first a film about society and social relationship. What's at the center of the story is the behavior of 150 people (or, more precisely, of 3 clans) who are forced to live together inside a tower, for years. So, the supernatural fog element here is only a pretext and doesn't represent the horror of the film. The fog is stil a nice concept, and being only a pretext works, for the movie (and its horror) is about human nature... which is really ugly, and devastating.
Still, one can regret that the concept is not used at its maximum potential. We would have loved to know better the characters, and the film to deal with psychological relations between the different characters, ie., how everyone reacts differently to the event. This is what we could have expected, as the film's promise, but it won't happen. Unfortunately, we can't really identify with the characters, and we don't care if one dies or doesn't: they're two dimensional, and not engaging (despite a great cast!), for we know nothing about them. Instead, they form different clans, and the whole film deals with the battle of these clans. Again, there are certainly lots of Nicloux's fears in this, as he mentioned THE TOWER was probably his most personal film. So, having different clans tells a lot about human nature, according to him, and is not an issue. The issue is that we, STILL, would have loved to know better the main protagonists.
The film is full of suspense and tension (camera work, lightings, costumes, settings are all great work), but again, suspense would have been much increased if we knew the characters better. The claustrophobic mood adds a lot, while the organization of the food in the pic is really disturbing. A disturbing experience with a feeling that something is unfinished.
