Annual Top Films Lists

Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2022: #58. Guillaume Nicloux’s La Tour d’Assitan

Published on January 10, 2022

La Tour d’Assitan (Lockdown Tower)

Upon getting a whiff of this project one can’t help but feel that Gareth Evans’ The Raid created a new subgenre — and the fact that Guillaume Nicloux is headed on the same path but with horror fantasy elements is even more intriguing. A whopping sixteen features into his filmography, the filmmaker teamed with producers Sylvie Pialat, Benoit Quainon and Bruno Nahon while reuniting with cinematographer Christophe Offenstein (Thalasso, Valley of Love) on La Tour d’Assitan (Lockdown Tower). Production began in April of 2021 in Paris with Angèle Mac, Clément Penhoat (aka Hatik), Ahmed Abdel Laoui and Kylian Larmonie.

Gist: The inhabitants of a tower block wake up one morning to find a black veil shrouding all the windows and doors of the building – a black veil which devours anything and anyone who tries to go through it…Stuck inside together, families organize themselves but time passes and nothing changes. They gradually return to their most primitive instincts and now respond to a single watchword: survival.

Release Date/Prediction: We see this as a Midnight special screening in Cannes.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).