JG Ballard served up in all his anarchic glory
High-Rise
15 cert. 112 min.
Dir: Ben Wheatley. Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller
There is almost nothing Ben Wheatley gets wrong in High-Rise, his coolly immaculate film of the JG Ballard science-fiction classic. In 1975, Ballard began with one of the great first lines in the genre: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”
The tone survives – unlike the poor mutt, one of whose paws we see turning on a spit-roast. The sick laugh inevitably delivered by this shot is Wheatley’s stock-in-trade, a kind of devilish grindhouse glee, and it’s just one of the things that makes him an ideal choice for serving up Ballard.
Anyone who knows the book, and just wants its downward slide into building-wide mayhem heaved up on screen in all its anarchic glory, gets it delivered to them on a silver platter – the lid whisked off with a flourish.
Wheatley, previously a low-budget cult hero after the likes of Down
Terrace and Kill List, has upped his craft and ambition here, too, thanks to the guiding hand of producer Jeremy Thomas, who previously helped David Cronenberg get his Ballard film Crash before the cameras. This has lipsmackingly lavish production values and looks the absolute business. One of Wheatley’s best choices is to present very much a Seventies dystopian vision, with the grisly wallpaper to match, on the eve of Margaret Thatcher’s ascent to power. It’s crucial that the 40-storey enclave of Ballard’s imagination be concrete and brutalist, not steel and glass.
Laing, played with bad-ass debonair insouciance by Tom Hiddleston, is a young doctor. He is tanning himself nude on the 25th floor when upstairs neighbour Charlotte (Sienna Miller) shouts down to introduce herself.
This hedonistic design for living is the concept of presiding architect Anthony Royal, played in a plum bit of casting by Jeremy Irons – whitesuited, crippled, he’s in drawling Boris Karloff mode, tapping round his penthouse garden with a cane.
“Is that a horse?” Laing asks on his first visit to the roof, as Royal’s queenly wife Ann (Keeley Hawes) swishes through on a white steed. The building was conceived “as a crucible for change”, says Royal. And change we get. In steady increments, civilisation starts to break down.
The lower-dwelling denizens of this stratified social microcosm, like poll tax rioters, start chafing at their lack of lift privileges, plundering neighbours’ wine deliveries. The swimming pool, on the 30th floor, turns into an increasingly filthy romp zone.
Wheatley brings the spirit of Seventies swinger parties into the mix with orgiastic results. Laing gets with Charlotte first, before working his way smoothly through most of the female cast. By the time Helen (Elisabeth Moss), wife of Luke Evans’s increasingly feral TV producer, has a tryst, she is very much a satisfied customer. “You are definitely the best amenity in the building,” she tells Laing.
Wheatley’s technicians fill every shot with fascinating coups. Mark Tildesley has done brilliant work as a production designer for Danny Boyle ( 28 Days Later, Sunshine) and Michael Winterbottom ( The Claim, Code 46), but the looming hulk of this building and its gradual interior blackening are his masterpieces. Clint Mansell’s sultry score invites us languidly into the fun.
It’s perfect, then? It is and it isn’t. There are minor snags in the ensemble, but more broadly, Wheatley stops short of making Ballard’s vision relevant to our debatably more anxious present. The tone is always more playful than it is disturbing, a walled-off black joke that opts out of saying anything new.