What would happen if a multiethnic, multiracial apartment tower in the Parisian projects found itself blocked off from the outside world, surrounded by a total blackness that consumes anything that attempts to pass through it?  That’s the premise to the 2022 French film Lockdown Tower, and the answer to that question isn’t pretty.

Fortunately, it makes for a riveting film, and while the world it paints is pretty bleak, it’s also unsettlingly realistic.

Basically, within hours of people realizing that their apartment complex is enveloped in an inky darkness—and that trying to go through it results in death and dismemberment (as several people lose limbs and hands after putting them into the darkness)—everybody starts developing tribal alliances based largely on race.  The film is good about showing and not telling, so I could be missing some factions, but essentially these are the ones I noticed:  the Whites, the Blacks/Africans, the North Africans/Middle Easterners, and a multiracial cult called “The Babyeaters” (as far as I recall, there are no depictions of babies being eaten or sacrificed to the black void).  The film alludes to several other factions that meet periodically in a council to negotiate between the groups, but those four are the man ones the film features.

Immediately, resources are scarce.  One of the Arab guys frantically tells his elderly parents to fill up every water bottle possible, not knowing when the water my give out (what’s interesting is that, while the building is isolated from the rest of the world—which may or may not continue to exist!—it maintains running water and electricity).  Loyal “tribe” members get a monthly “treat” consisting of a bag of Lay’s potato chips.  Dogs and cats are bred for food, and people grow small amounts of vegetables under grow lights in tiny containers.

It’s not all darkness and gang warfare.  There is an agreement among the tribes that the elderly and infirm are off-limits (the violation of this injunction results in hard blowback from the Whites).  While the electricity stays on—it goes off after about two years, either because a.) the blackness has destroyed electrical lines or b.) the power company shut it off due to nonpayment—people make do with a kind of hardscrabble existence, but still enjoying comfy chairs and video games.

Overall, though, it’s pretty bad.  The longer the situation endures, the worse things in the projects get.  Despite the uneasy truce between the gangs, warfare breaks out after the Whites ambush the Arab/North African leaders, binding and gagging three of them and putting them into the void.  That weirdly calms things down for a bit, but the Blacks plot their own attack on the Whites, only for the Whites to fight among themselves.

Perhaps the most unrealistic part of this movie—besides, you know, the darkness enveloping the building while water and power keep working—is that the Whites all team up.  We are, if nothing else, masochists when it comes to race.  Every other ethnic group under the sun closes ranks when times are tough, but not white people.  It’s perhaps a testament to our sense of cosmopolitan noblesse oblige that we try to bring everyone together.  Regardless, it is realistic to see white people bickering among themselves, so perhaps the film gets the racial politics more correct than it seems at first blush.

All controversial musing aside, things continue to deteriorate after the power goes out.  People walk around with torches and candles for light.  After the White infighting orphans a young child, a woman in the Blacks adopts the child, raising him as her own son—another moment of tender humanity amid the Hobbesian nightmare unfolding around them.  The film ends without any real resolution or hope, suggesting that the nightmare has no end.

I really enjoyed this flick.  It’s clearly an extended metaphor for the racial politics boiling just beneath the surface (and often boiling over it) in modern France.  The message suggests that diversity is, contra the training the human resources people made you do at work, not our strength.  But it also shows how individuals can show compassion to one another in even the worst circumstances—even while suggesting that, in the macro sense, things are pretty awful.

The leader of the Babyeaters is another interesting figure.  He’s an old black man who says that Jesus Is the Answer (correct), and that race is just a construct and waste of time.  He calls for unity, even as he leads a cult called—again—the “Babyeaters.”  A baby is never shown being eaten, so I was left wondering if the name was more of a lurid slander of the group, the same way that early critics of Christianity believed we were cannibals because we took Communion.  All that the movie shows is three pregnant women throwing different colored pebbles into the void as part of a ceremony or ritual.

There’s only one other review on the Internet (that I can find), from The Guardian; it is awful.  The woman writing the review, Cath Clarke, complains that the movie “starts grim and just gets grimmer … and grimmer.”  That’s perhaps the most tone-deafeningly female take I’ve ever read.  What did she expect—that people would join hands and sing campfire songs as they run out of food?  She is correct in pointing out the weird little idiosyncrasies, like the continued presence of running water and electricity, but I wrote these off as “suspension of disbelief” elements so we can have a story where not everyone dies from thirst after three days.  But her review is so glib and stupid, it makes me wonder why I’m not getting paid to write bad movie reviews for a major British newspaper.

I suspect it’s because she can’t bring herself to acknowledge that, in such dire circumstances, law-abiding people would probably find themselves quickly boiled alive in gigantic cauldrons by people with bones through their noses.  I suspect most of my readers will find that hard to swallow, too.  Lockdown Tower, however, is effective because we know the world it paints is true—whether we care to admit it or not.