High-Rise

Description

Director Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise audaciously reimagines J.G. Ballard’s legendary 1975 sci-fi satire. Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is a new tenant on the 25th floor of a tower block where a resident’s floor number denotes his social standing. Upper crust in demeanor but with apparent sympathies for the lower class, he arrives just as the building’s architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), seems to be losing his grip on the entire infrastructure. Laing’s own next-door neighbors, Richard (Luke Evans) and Helen (Elisabeth Moss), are part of the chaos, the fomenters of a cosmic revolution within the walls of their own home. The high-rise’s blueprint, says one character, “looks like an unconscious diagram of some kind of psychic event.” That perfectly describes this thriller’s descent into a frenzied, hypnotic kaleidoscope of upper-class orgies and blood-spurting fistfights. Wheatley’s film is a mind-melting masterpiece that thematically combines David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) with Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013). HIs regular cinematographer Laurie Rose (Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England) delivers another luscious visual landscape, while former Pop Will Eat Itself front man Clint Mansell, best known for his soundtracks for Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan), has concocted a near pitch-perfect synth score. High-Rise is the kind of risk-taking film that commands the viewer’s undivided attention. —Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

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