{"id":6264,"date":"2016-03-16T10:42:14","date_gmt":"2016-03-16T09:42:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/?p=6264"},"modified":"2016-07-14T08:39:26","modified_gmt":"2016-07-14T07:39:26","slug":"high-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2016\/03\/16\/high-rise\/","title":{"rendered":"High-Rise"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"High<\/a>
High-Rise<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

\nFormat:<\/B> Cinema

\nRelease date:<\/B> 18 March 2016

\nVOD release date:<\/B> 11 July 2016

\nBR\/DVD release date:<\/B> 18 July 2016

\nDistributor:<\/B> Studiocanal

\nDirector:<\/B> Ben Wheatley

\nWriter:<\/B> Amy Jump

\nBased on the novel by:<\/B> J.G. Ballard

\nCast:<\/B> Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans

\nUK 2015

\n119 mins\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Ben Wheatley\u2019s Ballard adaptation deliriously embraces social breakdown in a dystopian past future.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

We open on a doctor, Laing (Tom Hiddleston), clothes torn and paint-spattered, as he cooks a pedigree dog on an improvised barbecue on his balcony, after declining neighbour Steele (Reece Shearsmith)\u2019s offer to have a tipple with a clearly dead man. Back: the doctor has moved into a flat nearer the top than the bottom of an ultramodern building that towers over its undeveloped commuter belt surroundings, the work of architect Mr Royal (Jeremy Irons), who lives at the penthouse\/garden estate at its peak. It looks spectacular, but the cracks soon show. There are power outages. Rules are ignored. The technology isn\u2019t working as it should. And there\u2019s a growing sense of friction between floors. The toffs at the top are appalled at the likes of Laing showing up for a costumed ball with the wrong clothes and an inappropriately priced bottle of vino. And lower down the ladder, chippy cameraman Wilder (Luke Evans) bristles with revolutionary ire when he finds his kids are excluded from the swimming pool during an upper crust social. When Laing\u2019s upstairs neighbour, the liberated, and resented Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller) throws a party, it simmers with boozy anger and frustration. Things get out of hand. There\u2019s a beating. A suicide. Rival parties are planned in retaliation. A collective madness starts to take hold. The residents venture out of the building less and less, and then not at all. Resources, food and wine are running out and are to be battled over. Pets become food. Society within the tower tears itself apart, and re-organises. <\/p>\n

J.G. Ballard\u2019s High Rise<\/i> has long seemed the novel in his oeuvre begging most for cinematic adaptation (well, either High Rise<\/i> or Concrete Island<\/i>) \u2013 at least, after Cronenberg\u2019s Crash<\/i> made it viable to imagine any being filmed at all. It has neither the mega-budget requirements of his early SF, nor the gnomic intractability of The Atrocity Exhibition<\/i>, but manages to fit his themes into a single location with a limited cast of characters. That said, it was always going to be odd. I\u2019m amazed that what has finally emerged is this successful in capturing the flavour of the book, or at least a warped and woozy hybrid of Ballard and director Ben Wheatley\/writer Amy Jump\u2019s sensibilities.* <\/p>\n

Initially the urban setting might seem to signal a departure from the folk horror beats that were building through Wheatley\u2019s Kill List<\/i>, Sightseers<\/i> and especially A Field In England<\/i>, but a recurring theme in that movement is the malign and strange affect of landscape on personality, which is an obsession Ballard shared. High Rise<\/i> takes us away from the ancient outdoors to more modern interiors, but the creeping unease is the same. It isn\u2019t some viral contagion or chemical that is causing the madness (or even the porno-parasites of David Cronenberg\u2019s Shivers<\/i>, which riffs on similar ideas). It\u2019s the architecture<\/i>. Royal wants his building to be \u2018a crucible for change\u2019, which it most definitely is, though clearly not the change he expects or desires. He can fret all he likes over whether he has \u2018left out some vital element\u2019 but it\u2019s too late, the tower exerts its own logic, and there\u2019s no stopping evolution. As the upper classes\u2019 thuggish enforcer Simmons (Dan Renton Skinner) tells him, \u2018I don\u2019t work for you, I work for the building.\u2019 <\/p>\n

The methodology of this madness is evoked through a million cuts. Wheatley sets up tightly edited rhythms within the film showing the rituals of the block dwellers as they go to and from work, shop, swim, ride the lifts and live their lives, and then quietly introduces disruptions, unsettling images that increase in frequency, the pattern of things changes, visual and verbal cues build from a subliminal wrongness into full blown lunacy. A telling tracking shot at the halfway mark takes from one end of a supermarket display to the other, going from fresh fruit to rotting mush. Before that, the party scene at Charlotte\u2019s place is a marvel of drunken momentum and shifting tones, evoking Brit sex farce and brutal Alan Clark aggro along the way, and then suddenly changing gear for an alarming slow mo sequence of the coked up Wilder dancing, suddenly isolated in a strange tribal testosterone display, a bit of business that recurs in the penthouse apartment later in the story. In Jump\u2019s excellent screenplay, the dialogue is initially dominated by the party chit chat and small talk, the flirty one-liners and bitter put-downs whereby the residents subtly and not so subtly jockey for status, but here it always seems to be freighted with double meaning, to the point where even a banal exchange in the tower\u2019s supermarket, (\u2018keep the change\u2019 \u2013 \u2018there isn\u2019t any\u2019) feels loaded with portent. <\/p>\n

In the novel, if I remember rightly, language breaks down to caveman grunting as the devolution takes hold. But here, deliciously, the barbarity goes hand in hand with a weirdly civilised eloquence. Thus the top floor is full of men discussing their insane and brutal plans for the suppression of the lower floors in language befitting a golf club or yachting marina, a rugger club bumptiousness that wholly fails to recognise the home counties Mad Max<\/i> stylings of their current situation. There\u2019s something hilariously inappropriate about somebody raising the sudden prevalence of rape, violence and factional warfare with \u2019I\u2019d watch out if I were you, there\u2019s some very unhappy bunnies bouncing about\u2019. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s intoxicating\u2026. with the emphasis on the toxic, it\u2019s a bit of a phantasmagoria, cleverly weighted to keep you off balance and back footed. Most filmmakers making a tale this open to allegorical readings would surely decide to go for a vague and unspecified mise en sc\u00e8ne. Instead, Wheatley very specifically anchors his High-Rise<\/i> in the Britain of the mid to late 70s, with an exacting eye for detail, and cultural signifiers to the fore: there\u2019s a swinging Alan Whicker lookalike, a copy of Action Comic<\/i> (with the \u2018Kids Rule OK\u2019 cover), pound notes, indoor smoking, and not one but two cover versions of ABBA\u2019s \u2018S.O.S\u2019. This seems appropriate, and not just because the novel dates from 1975. The film consciously evokes the 70s cinema of Lindsay Anderson, Bu\u00f1uel, Roeg and Cammel, and works in that heady vein, being an artful treatment of difficult ideas rather than the usual elaborate treatment of banal ideas that dominates your modern multiplex. It\u2019s dense and delirious, both in words and images, in a way that defies simple readings. The sexual politics alone would take a thesis to unpick, moving from swingin\u2019 Carry On<\/i> innuendo, through nasty assault and into a kind of maternal utopianism. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen the film twice now, and think at the first viewing I was simply too dazzled for critical thinking. I just loved this combination of things<\/i>, these performances, this dialogue, that music.** The second time, I still loved it, and I\u2019d see it again in a heartbeat, but then I\u2019ve been quite taken with everything Wheatley has put out, whilst being quite aware that not everybody feels the same; a press screening of Sightseers<\/i> had me grinning from ear to ear, surrounded by people who made their loathing quite audible. Balls to them. You\u2019re either on Wheatley\u2019s wavelength\u2026 or you\u2019re wrong<\/i>. And I\u2019ll fight anyone who says different. But maybe that\u2019s the architecture talking. <\/p>\n

Mark Stafford<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n

*Jump has clearly worked her socks off trying to give the characters the motivations and story arcs required by modern cinema. Ballard was happier to work in a distinctly chillier, more oblique register. Horses for courses.<\/p>\n

** Clint Mansell, playing a blinder, and some very well chosen tunes, The Portishead \u2018SOS\u2019 moment is particularly effective.<\/p>\n

Watch the trailer:<\/B><\/p>\n