High-Rise

A Boy Eats His Dog -or- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Twenty-Fifth Floor.

It wasn’t the coke-fueled sex parties at the pool, the string quartet playing ABBA at a decadent, Restoration-period costume party in the penthouse, or the literal defacing of a cadaver’s head that struck me—the least of the film’s grotesqueries.   There’s a moment in Ben Wheatley’s HIGH RISE where physiologist Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) and Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), architect of a Gilliam-esque apartment complex-turned-social experiment, volley serves in a game of squash when you notice the warped, desiccated floorboards of the court.   This occurs well before other hints that Royal’s dream, residential towers intended to form an outstretched hand, is becoming an inescapable nightmare—think Sartre’s No Exit.

Adapted by Amy Jump from a novel by J.G. Ballard that’s been stuck in development hell for a good thirty years, HIGH RISE is a timely retro-mod commentary on social inequality that has no protagonist.  Rather, it has an agonist: The fucking trash chute.  I’m reminded of an apartment complex my wife and I lived in some years ago that was billed as “luxury living”.  The architect saddled the management company with, reportedly, somewhere around 1,300 design flaws.   A few dozen drunken trust fund baby, 3am-on-a-Tuesday pool orgies later, we abandoned ship… I kept tabs on the reviews only to discover that within the year that followed, the hallway trash pileups graduated to dogshit piles.  HIGH RISE descends through several more levels of hell before hitting bottom.

The film is more meticulous in design than the concrete albatross in which it takes place.  You know from the solitaires on both ring fingers, one weathered hand pressed to Laing’s forehead to confirm a fever, that his assistant is a remarried mother.  Is it relevant to the plot? No.  It’s relevant to the atmosphere, which plays somewhere in the space between Bong Joon Ho’s SNOWPIERCER (class warfare), Terry Gilliam’s BRAZIL (bureaucracy, aristocracy, excessive ductwork) , Cameron Crowe’s VANILLA SKY (trapped in a nightmare), and some touches of Richard E. Grant’s shrinking grasp on reality in Bruce Robinson’s HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING.

My former writer, Daniel Laabs, introduced the film at the Tenth Annual Dallas International Film Festival, exuberantly declaring it “insane”.  On the contrary, the film couldn’t be clearer.   It’s the tenants who slip (read: derail) into bacchanalian indulgence, save for Laing—the calm in the eye of the storm.  After dabbling in the sex, booze and brutality, in one instance over a can of paint in the onsite grocery store (it takes a moment before you realize that no one ever leaves this concrete hell except for work), Laing dissociates while the other residents unravel.  Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), his upstairs neighbor, is another matter.  Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller) is Wilder’s object of lust; Helen Wilder (Elizabeth Moss), his unbridled rage.  Yet Wilder remains, as Laing observes, actually sane—self-aware of the accretive psychological effects of the anarchy aboard this festering eyesore.

Royal and his entourage of aristocratic sycophants descend further into madness, at one point protesting that Wilder has taken to, “raping people he’s not supposed to rape” whilst themselves raping and pillaging.  It’s almost absurd, until you remember Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert.   Royal and his penthouse loiterers actively plot to steal resources from the lower floors/classes who are too far gone to organize a resistance—the women lack agency, the men are out to lunch.  Unlike the French Revolution, the film ends with a bang AND a whimper….