Tower. A Bright Day. (2017) User Reviews

A confusing yet engaging ride

[Howling_at_the_Moon_Reviews · 5/10 · 23 August 2023]

This one is undoubtedly going to ruffle some feathers. If you're looking for a concise, coherent story with a clear beginning-middle-end... This one's not for you.

This ended up being much more of an eerie and atmospheric family drama and art piece rather than a full blown horror/thriller. Where this film succeeds the most is in its acting, directing and generally impressive, down to earth portrayal of humans and a family dynamic.

This one is undoubtedly a crawler. The pacing is very slow, the run time is long and not all THAT much happens. Despite all of this, I somehow didn't mind it. The movie was aesthetically so pleasurable to watch and the acting and editing were so good that I was engaged for the majority.

It was peaceful yet unsettling and instilled a decent amount of dread even after viewing. You truly feel like you are just following these real to life people around through their day to day life. They did this cool editing thing that I personally have not seen before where they essentially jumped back to the beginning of the scene and showed it from another perspective which I found interesting and wish they had utilized more.

I definitely think they could have accomplished what was successful in this film while cutting it down a bit and instilling a bit more story into it. Virtually nothing is explained and you have to be okay with that going in if you're going to enjoy it. 4.5 rounding up to a 5. Would recommend but certainly not for everyone.

Strangeness is not a virtue in itself...

[Ebert · 4/10 · 10 November 2020]

265/5000 It is true that Poland is a country of mystics. but that alone does not justify the gratuitous strangeness of this film. Dadaism is not enough to classify all the bizarre and unjustified events of the film. As the poet Giambattista Marino said: "It couldn't be new, it was strange" ...

A Graduation Film That Makes for One of the Best Polish Debut Features

[Marc_Horrickan · 8/10 · 6 October 2018]

Jagoda Szelc was still a film student in Lodz when she began working on this entirely original Polish horror-drama, that makes exceptional use of location and theme. What is most impressive though, is the way in which Szelc directs the acting talent on display. This is a director who seems naturally gifted at extracting stunning performances from adults and children alike.

Tower. A Bright Day is that rarest of beasts, a Polish horror film. It is infused with the iconography and symbolism that is playing out a battle between conflicting belief systems and conceptions of good and evil. This is a film that subtly adopts the long view, gauging the paganism that underpins so much of Polish Catholicism to be something fixed in nature and specific locales. As a result we have the most unsettling and anxiety-inducing use of forest and lake that I have seen since THE WITCH.

Szelc overlays this horror core of her film with the very human drama of two warring siblings fighting over the soul of a young child. Mula (Anna Krotoska) is a believer, whose Christian virtues have made her fill the void in the life of her niece, Nina, when her birth mother Kaja (a terrifying performance from Malgorzata Szczerbowska), checks out of her life for a significant period of time. To complicate matters Kaja and Mula are sisters. When their brother Andrzej brings Kaja to visit Nina on the weekend of her First Communion, all the myriad divisions between these two fraternal siblings comes to the fore, as they struggle for maternal dominance.

This is a film that simply has to be experienced on the big screen, as from its opening omnipotent drone footage, through to the haunting closing shot it is a mysterious, sinister and unnerving examination of what we obscure, repress and elide.