High-Rise

Ben Wheatley – 2016 – England

I didn’t particularly want or expect to like this film.  I wasn’t as big an admirer as some of Wheatley’s Kill List (2011).  I anticipated having a similar reaction to High-Rise; i.e. that the premise is great with the execution falling short.  But, I have to admit, I was won over pretty quickly and remained transfixed throughout.  Wheatley commendably strikes a solid ground between stylization and a confident simplicity of approach, and I was immediately conscious of the film’s cinematic heritage among the 70s films of guys like Herzog, Polanski and Russell, (and not only because it is set in the 1970s).  Wheatley doesn’t blatantly reference those (or other) filmmakers, but High-Rise feels like the kind of deliriously metaphoric film those directors have often made.  More than anyone, though, the specter of David Cronenberg seems to loom over the film – at least in my mind.  His film Shivers (1975) debuted the same year as J.G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise, and the similarities are so severe that it would be implausible that one was not a major influence on the other were it not for the fact that they both must have been in the works simultaneously.  Cronenberg is also, of course, a notorious adapter of Ballard’s work; the 1973 novel Crash being the basis for the auteur’s 1996 film.  The only difference from Wheatley I can imagine that Cronenberg would have done in adapting High-Rise would be the inclusion of some kind of instigating agent that results in the characters’ behavior; which is exactly what he did in Shivers.  In High-Rise, a successful doctor named Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moves into a state-of-the-art apartment building designed to be a model for utopian living, complete with super markets and other amenities that make it possible for people to stay in the building 24/7 save for the few career men who leave for their jobs each day.  We quickly learn that the residents of the higher floors are the aristocracy while those closer to the ground are the bourgeoisie and underclass, and are quite vocal about it.  In short order, things begin to malfunction as enormously as if by intentional sabotage or according to a planned social experiment using humans instead of rats.  Without power, light and fresh food, a contagious kind of madness sets in among the building’s tenants, who regress to tribal, criminal and eventually feral behavior.  There is no explanation for what keeps the people from doing what any rational person would in real life; just leave.  This is the film’s central conceit and it’s what will make audiences either love or hate it.  I chose to read it as a simple dramatic choice that requires no clarification beyond the fact that it happens; just like the dinner guests in Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962) who are inexplicably trapped – as though by social ties alone – in a house that has nothing tangible preventing their exit.  That was a risky choice on Wheatley’s part – in a day and age where viewers demand believability and exposition far more than originality – and I applaud him for it; it would have been easy for him to revise Ballard’s fable to plug up or gloss over anything that might be perceived as plot holes, which these days is pretty much anything remotely ambiguous or challenging.  If one thing had me troubled, it was the nature of the film’s allegory about class strife being so close to the surface; far too close for my taste.  A climactic radio broadcast of a Margaret Thatcher speech locks us firmly in a time and place – Britain in the 70s.  Despite the story’s milieu, I felt that the issues in it were relevant to our present time and culture and might have been stronger if the film maintained a less specific setting and if its points about class were a little less “on the nose.”  As a withering critique of England as a crumbling empire, High-Rise is on a par with Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man (1973), but for me, the strongest material in the film was the portrayal of a microcosm eating itself alive, regardless of when and where it takes place.  Overall, I was quite impressed that Wheatley managed to do justice to Ballard’s novel, (possibly even elevating it, as Cronenberg did with Crash), while never copping out by making it into a more obvious crowd-pleaser, as I’m sure there must have been pressure to do.