Life for the residents of a tower block begins to run out of control.
Director: Ben Wheatley
Writers: J.G. Ballard (novel), Amy Jump
Stars: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller
Story line
Life for the residents of a tower block begins to run out of control. Rated R for violence, disturbing images, strong sexual content/graphic nudity, language and some drug useAt one point there's a car right outside the building with a clearly
made-up number plate. Something like DAE 080X. The leading zero is
incorrect, X is 1981 (the film is set in the 1970s) and the number plate
font is the newer post-2001 one. A shame as the effort to amass all the
cars must have been huge. In Spain was a premiere in Barcelona (Phenomena). The film was projected for 2 days only in subtitled version.
User Reviews
Ben
Wheatley is one of the most exciting British directors working today.
His two best films are Kill List, a deeply disturbing horror/thriller
about a tormented contract killer, and Sightseers, a black comedy about a
troubled couple on their parochial, psychopathic honeymoon.
Key
to these films' success are strong characters with interesting dynamics.
Kill List begins almost like a domestic kitchen-sink drama centred on
the failing relationship between Jay (Neil Maskell) and Shel (MyAnna
Burning), but it subsequently evolves, or rather devolves, into
something dark, dank and horrible in a most unpredictable manner.
Sightseers may be most commonly remembered for its scenes of outlandish
violence, such as when Chris (Steve Oram) deliberately runs over a
litterer in a fit of righteous anger. However, underneath the comic
outbursts of gore is the poignant relationship between Chris and Tina
(Alice Lowe), an oddball pair with a past of loneliness and insecurity.
Having
proved himself as a director of visceral horror and emotional
substance, Ben Wheatley is the natural choice to direct J.G. Ballard's
High-Rise, a Goldingesque tale of violent class war exploding within a
brutalist tower block. The fragility of civilisation, and the primitive
savagery that lurks beneath it, is a darkly fascinating subject that has
made for excellent films and books, such as Threads, a devastating
vision of post- apocalyptic Britain, and William Golding's Lord of the
Flies, which needs no introduction.
High-Rise does not brush
shoulders with such works, for its allegory of class divide gets lost in
a dull montage of blood, sweat and blue paint. Oh, and dancing air
hostesses, for reasons that are, to put it politely, enigmatic.
The
focal characters – Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a measured, middle
class doctor; Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller), a sultry woman who
serves as Laing's gateway in to the high culture of the upper floors;
Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), a pugnaciously aspirational documentary
maker; and Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), the patrician architect who
designed the building – are introduced well enough, but ultimately do
not receive sufficient development.
As the lead and perhaps most
relatable character, we are in the body of Laing when he traverses the
tower's social scene, which he admits to 'not being very good at'. Some
may find him steely, but Laing has an affable reserve and high emotional
intelligence. He isn't particularly interested in the petty
one-upmanship that comes with climbing the social ladder, but he manages
to deftly negotiate it anyway through his insouciant reserve that
maintains peoples' interest and disarms any potential enemies.
Hiddleston, one of Britain's hottest exports, is well cast here, he
delivers the best performance of the film.
However, after a
competent introduction to society in the high rise, Laing and the others
get lost in an incoherent narrative that favours aesthetics and
absurdity over credible character interplay. It begins three months
ahead of the main events, showing a blood spattered Laing roasting a
dog's leg over a fire surrounded by dirt and detritus. After the
aforementioned introductory period of around thirty minutes, the film
then charts what led to this repellent spectacle with a disjointed
series of set pieces that give little sense of progression.
Electrical
problems are plaguing the building and resentment is brewing between
the upper and lower floors, but the descent into nihilism just… happens.
Dogs are being drowned, Laing's painting his apartment (and himself)
like a total madman and the whole building becomes a rubbish-strewn
nightmare – but there's no tension, no crescendo, no credibility and,
curiously, no one who considers leaving! The worsening relations should
have been more gradual and given much greater depth and meaning by the
characters, their dialogue and their relationships. Instead, the main
character covers himself in paint to communicate his increasingly
aberrant state of mind, which appears to be an obvious metaphor for
tribal decorations.
High-Rise fails as a film about primal
savagery and particularly as a film about class. In Woody Allen's Blue
Jasmine, I cringed as Jasmine and her husband Hal, arrogant members of
New York high society, barely contained their raging superiority
complexes as they awkwardly condescended to Ginger (Jasmine's sister)
and Augie, a decidedly blue collar couple who wonder at Hal and
Jasmine's luxurious home. No such realist interplay is to be found in
High-Rise, because its characters are thinly drawn and it isn't rooted
in reality, which is very much to its detriment.
Towards the
film's end, there are moments in which Royal and his minions discuss the
politics and future of the tower, with Royal remarking that the lower
floors should be 'Balkanised', meaning that they should be fragmented
and pitted against each other in a manner reminiscent to the Yugoslav
Wars of the 1990s. I liked the use of that phrase, there should have
been a lot more of this in the script, more overt political manoeuvring
rather than surrealist claptrap and brutalist 70s chic.
Alas,
Wheatley's High-Rise is more concerned with aesthetics and the 1970s,
which means there's more in the way of shag-pile carpets, dodgy hair and
the colour brown than developed characters, coherent narrative
structure and sociopolitical substance.
