High-Rise immediately declares its intention to shock, showing a bloodstained Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) spit roasting a dog and living a feral existence in his newly deluxe modern tower block. Director Ben Wheatley’s film based on the 1975 novel by J.G. Ballard delivers many more provocative tableaux of class struggle and human degradation, even if it is light on the specifics of exactly how the transformation transpires.
Laing, a rising physiologist, moves into the high-rise to invest in his future and quickly finds his new building to be a society unto itself. Complete with a market, a pool, and a rooftop garden big enough to ride a horse in, it’s hardly necessary to ever leave the building and many never do. The building sorts its residents by class, with the building’s architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) living at the top amongst a decadent aristocracy and the firebrand, working class documentarian Wilder (Luke Evans) and his teeming brood of children at the bottom, while the professional Laing lives in the middle, able to move between these worlds (the names are not subtle). Royal explains to Laing that he intended the building as “a crucible for change” and it is indeed a crucible, but less for change than an atavistic return to humanity’s basest nature while maintaining the vocabulary of modern snobbishness. When the lower floors are hit with deprivations and interruptions of crucial services, they strike out against the higher floors, which in turn seek to loot more and more from below for their own consumption and to keep the lower floors in line.
Wheatley’s greatest achievement is capturing Ballard’s tone, the insouciant detachment laced with very black humor. Ballard also might have approved of the cinematography, which blends brutally beautiful geometric compositions with bold splashes of color and constant movement. There’s often a hallucinatory feel as scenes blend into each other with little orientation for the audience and the building’s descent into an orgy of sex, death, and cocktail parties feels outside anyone’s individual control. As the struggle intensifies, the action becomes too chaotic and the characters too numerous to entirely follow, but the general picture gets across. Wheatley and his collaborator Amy Jump seem less interested in the more theoretical details of Ballard’s ideas than in giving his vision a memorable physicality. The tower’s imposing bulk and cavernous depths are brought to life unforgettably and Wheatley gives a visual flair to party and dialogue scenes, which are littered with Ballard’s incisive quips about the social dimensions of class. Keeping the action in 1975 allows for fun costumes, but also seems like a missed opportunity since the novel is arguably more relevant now and is indicative of the film’s tendency to prioritize sensory experience over anything too intellectual. But this isn’t a textbook on class struggle; it’s a provocation, of a piece with A Clockwork Orange and Godard’s Weekend. Don’t come for character development or plausibility, but for the bon mots and bomb throwing. One striking scene shows a child viewing a murder through a kaleidoscope, which could summarize the whole movie – beautiful, bewildering, exciting, disturbing, and unique.
