Kritiken

Enchanting and good-humoured (as with almost all of Smith’s films), The Black Tower tells a singular story of architectural horror and madness worthy of the ungovernable geographies of Machen, Welles, or Lovecraft, situating itself firmly in the quotidian grit of Thatcher’s Britain

Premised on one of the most elementary forms of cinematic illusionism, The Black Tower has much to say about film’s deceptions. You could understand its story as a parable of narrative film viewing, the fantasies that cinematic representation engender being, like the eponymous tower, so seductive that they continue to do psychic harm even after we know better.

The Black Tower is perhaps [John Smith's] most entertaining work... The tower is a metaphor for human subjectivity. In a way, Smith’s madness is just an extreme version of what we all do, a way of exploring the borderline between personal vision and hallucination.