Horror covers the tower with darkness – Newspaper Kommersant No. 61 (7506) dated 04/10/2023

At the box office – The Mist (La Tour) by Guillaume Niclou: either a social parable with elements of a horror film, or a horror film with pretensions to social generalizations. horror Mikhail Trofimenkov did not frighten, and generalizations did not convince.

“Mist” can be called a bold, if not suicidal, experiment for Niklu. The director, accustomed to working with stars from Depardieu and Deneuve to Bellucci and Huppert, this time gathered on the screen not so much an ensemble cast as a crowd of unintelligible extras.

Usually, Niklou cared about a solid literary basis for his films, among them the film adaptation of Diderot’s The Nun and, say, Grange’s The Brotherhood of the Stone. The script for The Mist resembles, with the exception of the first fifteen minutes of the film, a film adaptation of drafts thrown into the wastebasket due to blatant dramaturgical absurdity.

The only merit of the film, sustained in a dirty, greenish-brown scale, is its hour and a half running time. However, as they say in the weather reports, “it’s minus one outside, it feels like minus ten.” It feels like the film is endless, it could just as well last for half an hour, and six hours, and even breaks off in mid-sentence.

However, part of the progressive French film critics appreciated it as a powerful social metaphor. The metaphor of what, the critics have not been able to formulate. Well, like, you understand, that’s all this that surrounds us. And, consequently, French society is surrounded by a complete haze. Obviously, the many years of friendship and cooperation between Niklu and the professional pessimist Michel Houellebecq did not go in vain for the director’s psyche.

The primary cell of society is an apartment building in a Parisian suburb of an average level of squalor. At first, even above average: if we turn to Russian analogies, a time-worn high-rise building of the 1970s. Naturally, people of all colors of the rainbow and very modest incomes live there.

One day they discover that the mobile connection has gone out, the TVs have gone out, and nothing can be seen outside the window. “The tower is gone,” they whisper. The film is originally called “The Tower”, but it is not clear which tower is being referred to. Either about the same neighboring human settlement, or about the Eiffel Tower, which can be seen in the distance. The darkness that has gathered around is not only sticky-impenetrable, but also deadly. One man carelessly leaned out into the darkness, and – both – on – in the hands of his companions, the cut off leg of the experimenter remains. Amputations are painless: the old woman, looking for her cat, did not notice that she did not have a hand.

Civil society instantly begins to self-organize on a racial basis either into self-defense units or into ethnic gangs. White to white, black to black, Arab to Arab. Someone melancholy burns large banknotes, someone checks the bottomlessness of the darkness, throwing a monitor out the window, not far from the first blood.

All this prelude occupies just those first fifteen minutes, when Niklu is still holding on to a banal, but logical thread of the story. After all, any nightmare is only then nightmare, any dystopia is only convincing when they obey their nightmarish or dystopian logic.

In Niklu, after the events of the night when the darkness came, episodes follow, separated from it by five months, two and five years. With each time step, the inhabitants of the house grow inexorably into a rage. Clans that fought each other go to self-destruction. Thank you for the fact that man is a beast, world culture has been telling for a long time and repeatedly. Another question is how all these Ahmeds and Natans, Shakibs and Mansours, Mateo and Bruno generally survived, almost without losing weight, for such a long time in complete isolation.

Why is the light still on in the house? Why were not all dogs and cats eaten in the first weeks, which their owners carefully hide from gangs of unbridled youngsters? What do they feed them? Where do they get “fool”? Where the hell do they get the ammo from? And how does a girl born already in the dark know what the horses she draws look like? With all the imitation of suffering, physical and psychological, with all the hints that caterpillars and, possibly, babies are used as food, people live in the darkness in every way richer than some homeless people. The result was not a parable, not a dystopia, but some kind of burlesque about a quarreled association of homeowners.

Yes, they have spoiled their habitat considerably during the years of darkness. They punched a lot of some meaningless holes-passages in the walls. Painted all the walls with graffiti. But, honestly, the inhabitants of the troubled suburbs of Paris achieve the same results without otherworldly interference. What, the police do not come to the inhabitants of the “Mist” to put an end to lawlessness? So, Lord have mercy, she won’t go to such places in real life either.