High-Rise Review

There's a word that is often banded around when a famous book goes from person to person and failed project to failed project, un-adaptable. This has happened with many books in the past, such as Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian which still struggles to make it to screen, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas which did make it to screen. High-Rise is a 1975 novel from J.G. Ballard which focuses on a class war between the higher and lower floors of a high-rise apartment building, eventually descending into anarchy and mayhem. After failed attempts to bring the novel to screen the project eventually landed at the feet of a British director who's been on his own rapid rise, Kill List and Sightseers Ben Wheatley.

It is unmistakably a Wheatley sort of project, the material plays to his dark sensibilities as well as his innate Britishness. Wheatley manages to capture the nostalgic yet also oddly futuristic feel to the film. The slow deterioration of normality and rationality as the film progresses is managed so effectively that by the time things do deteriorate into anarchy, rape and murder and eating dogs seems oddly rational.

Plaudits must be given to screenwriters Amy Jump and Benjamin Taylor, who have managed to successfully adapt the seemingly un-adaptable. Most notable in their adaptation is they've managed to make the incredibly passive protagonist of the novel seem investing. Laing is the lead character of the book, but he sort of comes off as a spectator in his own story, in the film Tom Hiddleston is given more weight to the character, Hiddleston's Laing has some much needed edge. When everyone else is losing their minds his calm demeanour comes off as alarmingly sociopathic, as Luke Evans manic bull of a character Wilder observes “the real dangerous ones are the self-contained types like you”.

High-Rise won’t be for everybody, it’s not quite the film that its trailer might suggest. It's a slow film which might bore some viewers but there's so much style to it that its worth taking the time. The featured soundtrack is an impressive combination of synth and pop and oozes cool throughout the building. It's an odd film bound to find a following akin to the book, but more than anything its a Wheatley film, dark, funny, violent and with its focus on the class system, very British. (High 4 Stars)