Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, starring Tom Hiddleston, is an interesting idea packaged into utter incomprehensibility.
This review was written by Marion Koob.
J.G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise is a denunciation of contemporary capitalism. Its adaptation to the big screen, directed by Ben Wheatley, adopts the same ethos, but with confusing results. The film is a well-shot, nonsensical series of events which quickly become dull.
Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moves into an apartment in the High-Rise, a modernist building project in which life is meant to be self-contained. There’s a supermarket, swimming pool, gym, squash courts, and very little reason to leave. The neighbors know everything about each other, obsess over the building rules, and regularly throw wild parties.
Laing is soon introduced to Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), the architect of the project who lives on the top floor in an idyllic garden with his deranged wife. Laing, however, soon realizes that he is not expected to keep the acquaintance. Social status is marked by the floor you live on, and he and his friends Richard (Luke Evans), Helen (Elisabeth Moss) and Charlotte (Sienna Miller) belong to the lower levels.
Electricity shortages fuel tensions between lower and upper floor residents, and the building quickly collapses into chaos and violence. Residents organize competing festivities, beat each other up and destroy the property, and forget to empty bins or clean themselves.
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However, none of their actions have any logic, or any aims — and the story provides no explanation as to why sane, overly-conventional neighbors transform — at the literal flick of a switch — wild. There is no real sense of emotion or relationship among the characters either. They float side by side, interacting almost as if one didn’t understand the other.
Mesmerized by the High-Rise, everyone remains completely oblivious to the damage being wrought around them, treating it all as a bit of good fun. Some of the dialogue emerging from these situations is rather funny, but mostly it’s as senseless: In response to a kidnapping, the upper floors aim to throw a party to surpass their adversaries. Meanwhile, the lower floors barricade their corridors and burn the cars out on the parking lots — but there are no opponents. By the end, characters are discussing lobotomies, eating horses, and barbecuing dogs.
The High-Rise building itself is visually beautiful, and the interior decor of this modernist monstrosity is handsomely executed. The construction’s creepiness and the oddity of the other residents are an overt critique of conformism and consumerism.
Otherwise, there’s not much to say for this film. Hiddleston, Irons, and Evans give good performances, but their characters make no sense whatsoever. The plot is intriguing at first, augmented by the curious setting and swelling soundtrack, but it quickly becomes uninteresting, so much so that it’s a struggle to stay focused for the last hour of the film.
High-Rise has a solid premise, and could have made for a great dystopian flick, had it been better articulated. As it is now, the sequence of events comes across as rather random, the characters mad, or unbelievable – and the result is baffling. Sadly, neither writer Amy Jump nor director Ben Wheatley did much with J.G. Ballard’s original text.
Rating: C+
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