‘I’m a modernist by trade’ says Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), the Corbusier-like architect responsible for the immense concrete tower at the centre of High-Rise. He certainly knows a thing or two about brutalism. By the time Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moves in to the building, the cracks have already started to show. Power cuts and blocked rubbish shoots are only the most superficial symptoms of decay – more worrying is the violent discontentment of the lower floors and the Olympian condescension of those above. Fortunately for Laing, class war is not his style. A ‘self-contained type’ – as the mutton-chopped proletarian filmmaker Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) observes – he’s more interested in finding the right shade of paint for his open-plan living area, before retiring to the balcony to enjoy the sunset over a dinner of spit-roasted dog.
Unfortunately, this sleight of hand – a glimpse of the lucidity at the heart of madness – only goes so far
High-Rise is a film that slips easily between mundanity and violence. The writer-director team of Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley adapt JG Ballard’s novel as a slick, surrealist nightmare, disorientating the viewer with non-linear editing and bizarre juxtapositions – including a Versailles-like pleasure garden on the roof of a seventies tower block – until order and chaos begin to seem interchangeable. The Laing who scavenges for food in rubbish-strewn stairwells remains coolly polite with his neighbours – those of them who haven’t been massacred – and even exhibits a sort of deluded domestic pride. Other characters prove no less adaptable to the change in circumstances. It’s as if rape and murder were merely a continuation of social existence by other means.
Unfortunately, this sleight of hand – a glimpse of the lucidity at the heart of madness – only goes so far. High-Rise is sometimes shocking and sometimes funny, but for all its daring it doesn’t quite come off. Laing’s ‘self-containment’ distances him from the major events of the plot, making them seem insignificant, even unreal; and while this may be a plausible means of dramatising alienation, it robs the film of urgency. The more-or-less climactic confrontation between Royal – representing the upper orders – and Wilder – representing the lower – is dreamlike and insubstantial, making you wonder whether it’s society that’s collapsed or just the film. An ill-judged closing radio broadcast of Margaret Thatcher extolling the virtues of individualism and small government suggests the latter. Ballard’s interest in violence was always more anthropological than political, and for the most part Jump and Wheatley succeed in capturing this. But they make one crucial mistake: it’s not capitalism that eats dogs – it’s people.
High-Rise is showing at HOME and the AMC on Deansgate.
