Review: High-Rise

High-Rise (15)

UK 2016 119 mins Dir: Ben Wheatley Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Luke Evans, Sienna Miller, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy, Keeley Hawes

Less a scabrous movie than one than gleefully picks off the scab to expose the festering wound beneath, High-Rise is provocative, exhilarating filmmaking that marks an inspired union between British director Ben Wheatley and author J.G. Ballard’s celebrated 1975 novel.

Upon closer inspection, it’s not hard to see why Wheatley is such an ideal fit with Ballard’s corrosive vision, one detailing the terrifying social breakdown within a plush London tower block. After all, Wheatley has always had a sense of the grotesque in his movies, whether it’s the extreme violence of the genre-blending Kill List, the darkly comic serial killer caravanning movie Sightseers or the trippy, head-scrambling atmosphere of Civil War tale A Field in England.

In fact, what Wheatley and his regular writing partner Amy Jump have done is taken their mordant sense of humour and amplified it within the context of Ballard’s story, resulting in a hybrid vision that, while not flawless, makes for gloriously gruesome entertainment: a cross-pollination of Peter Greenaway surrealism with the socio-realist humour of Mike Leigh. Tom Hiddleston is perfectly cast as Dr. Robert Laing, the newest arrival at the eponymous high-rise whose quest for anonymity is quashed when he’s immediately drawn into the class struggle within the building’s walls. With the residents’ status and power directly proportional to what floor they’re on (richer at the top, poorer at the bottom), insurrection and anarchy are inevitable, spearheaded by hectoring documentary filmmaker Richard (Luke Evans).

Meanwhile, Richard’s heavily pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss) quietly pines for a better existence on a higher floor and seductive Charlotte (Sienna Miller) is attempting to fend off Richard’s advances. Perched at the very top in his bizarrely opulent penthouse-come-folly is architect Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), the man who designed the block as a “crucible for change” but whose self-styled social experiment soon spirals out of control. And drifting through all the rampant social paranoia is Laing himself, the most eerily self-possessed of all the movie’s characters and perhaps the most dangerous for the way in which he positions himself outside the line of conflict.

There’s no denying that Wheatley and Jump take great relish in getting to grips with Ballard’s juicy social satire, effectively deploying a precision-honed visual style that more than makes up for the absence of the author’s icy prose. Is the atmosphere of the building itself facilitating a social collapse? Is Laing’s attempt to live anonymously within such a high-rise ultimately a foolhardy attempt to mask his own animalistic id? These themes are forever swirling and spiralling around like the colours of the kaleidoscope deployed by Charlotte’s young son Toby (Louis Suc), seemingly the only character who can see where everything is headed. That Wheatley and Jump stay true to Ballard’s brutalist 1970s setting also heightens the irony: it’s a movie with one foot in the not-too-distant past that has plenty to say about how far we’ve failed to advance in the intervening years.

Working in conjunction with cinematographer Laurie Rose and production designer Mark Tildesley, Wheatley at first presents us with the intoxicating world of the high-rise, all slow-motion and opulent visuals, before raw, hand-held camera takes over during the brutally animalistic second half (eerily presaged by the increasingly rank nature of the block‘s swimming pool and a tracking shot across rotting fruit in the supermarket). Meanwhile Clint Mansell’s deliciously opulent score paints human existence as an operatic symphony of excess, one that will become increasingly twisted as the score proceeds, although a widely reported cover of Abba’s S.O.S. by Portishead is perhaps a tad too on-the-nose in amplifying Ballard’s themes.

It’s also a movie whose accumulation of tension owes an unashamed debt to blockbusting disaster epics such as The Towering Inferno; just imagine festering social unease in place of a raging fire. In fact, the shift from banal civility to all-out warfare is perhaps where the movie slightly falls down: whereas in Ballard’s novel the sense of disintegration crept up on the reader, on screen the development feels a bit blunted and rushed, relying too heavily on montage to fill in the time gaps. Nevertheless, when the rest of the movie is such an intoxicatingly morbid rush it’s hard to complain: from the notorious dog-devouring opening to the bleakly troubling climax, it’s a superbly acted feast of depravity, and almost certainly Wheatley’s best film to date.