High-Rise opens with a near-feral Tom Hiddleston spit roasting a dog’s paw in the ruined innards of an apartment building, a savage statement of intent and a warning shot for the considerable mayhem to come.
English director Ben Wheatley (A Field in England) goes to stylistic and narrative extremes in adapting the 1975 novel by the transgressive science fiction soothsayer J.G. Ballard. The book’s satirical elements don’t always make the smoothest translation to the screen, but Wheatley brings his own ferocious vision to Ballard’s parable of a society tearing itself apart.
The story picks up three months before the world’s most unpleasant barbecue, as Dr. Robert Laing (Hiddleston) is moving into a new high-rise tower whose Brutalist exterior contains a grocery store, a swimming pool, various other amenities, and a simmering class war.
The complex’s tenants are arranged by income. The richest, including the building’s idealistic architect (Jeremy Irons), live near the top. The poorest residents are on the bottom floors, where an unsuccessful documentary filmmaker (Luke Evans) with a Che Guevara poster on his wall drinks himself into a revolutionary fervor and mistreats his pregnant wife, played by Elisabeth Moss. Laing, a young single professional, falls somewhere in the middle, making acquaintances above and below.
It’s not long before fissures begin to erupt in the tower’s ecosystem. Power outages, food shortages, and economic resentment lead to escalating acts of bizarre violence and cruel behavior. Trash piles up. Tribes are formed. People stop going to work. Laing’s surgeon day job involves stripping the flesh from cadavers (he has other problems that are not so easily blamed on his increasingly unhinged living situation), so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that this “self-contained man” doesn’t just move out as the complex descends into anarchy. He’s comfortable with madness.
High-Rise is a pitch-black comedy, a disaster movie, and a psychological thriller. It’s a period piece — Margaret Thatcher is heard extolling the virtues of capitalism over the airwaves — and a science fiction film with plenty of contemporary resonance. The phrase “one percent” is never used, but there’s nothing subtle about the conspicuous wealth of the tower’s topmost residents, who throw lavish parties that would make Marie Antoinette blush.
As an atmosphere of depraved insanity takes hold of the building and the film’s dreamlike pulse begins to quicken, Wheatley ramps up the hallucinatory visuals. Whatever fever has gripped the residents of the high-rise seems to spread until the movie hits its kaleidoscopic crescendo.
By the time we return to Hiddleston hungrily eyeing that dog, High-Rise has shown us much worse. It’s nothing we — greedy, awful human beings that we are — aren’t horribly capable of.
