High-Rise

FILMS OF THE MONTH

United Kingdom/Belgium 2015

Director: Ben Wheatley
Certificate 15 118m 54s
Reviewed by Henry K. Miller
Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
In Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, as in his previous film
A Field in England (2013), also written by Amy
Jump, the country is on the edge of something. In
the earlier film it was the execution of Charles I
and the establishment of a Puritan republic; in this
one it’s Margaret Thatcher’s first general election
victory 330 years later. Jump has adapted J.G.
Ballard’s source novel, set in the Britain of the
1960s or 1970s but largely free of specific period
markers, into a film redolent of the book’s year of
publication, 1975, also the year that Thatcher
became Tory leader. Cars, costumes, decor and
facial hair are all echt mid-1970s. Whereas the
high-rise of the book – more or less a stand-in for
the Barbican, populated by “an apparently
homogeneous collection of high-income
professional people” – is riven by violent, quasi-
social conflicts that seem to have their origin in
the building’s design, in the film the revolt of the
airline pilots of the lower floors against the tax
consultants of the middle is tantamount to actual
class war. The rolling power cuts and overflowing
rubbish bins bring to mind the Three-Day Week
and the Winter of Discontent, and one of the orgies
characterising the building’s descent into social
chaos evokes Bianca Jagger’s fabled entrance into
Studio 54 on a white horse.
Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), a lower-storey
television documentary maker alienated by the
building’s automation of daily life, becomes an
emblem of virtually proletarian authenticity,
while sharp-suited, clean-shaven physiologist
Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is a prototypical
yuppie of the next decade, newly installed in a
mid-level apartment and perfectly attuned to
the regime of anomie and anonymity. In so far as Divided self: Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) in the elevator of his high-rise residence
the film has a plot beyond the unravelling of the
high-rise’s social fabric, it is centred on Wilder and significance of architecture” lay in the kinds Politics of Experience of the old belief that “the ‘seat’
Laing’s relationship with the building’s architect of experience it offered or curtailed – although of the soul was somewhere in the brain. Since
and owner Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons). A unlike Robert, R.D. thought that conditions in brains began to be opened up frequently, no one
frustrated modernist who has had to build an the “modern megalopolis” were necessarily has seen ‘the soul’.” Hiddleston’s character, deftly
English country garden on the roof to please his constricting. In an early scene, Robert is shown suggesting without parading the damage that has
upper-class wife Ann (Keeley Hawes), he laments happily dissecting a human brain for the benefit been done beneath the dapper exterior, does not
that the high-rise, conceived along egalitarian of his students, having peeled back the face from give the impression that he still believes there
brutalist lines as a “crucible for change”, has the skull. It’s a striking image, which takes on is anything to see. In a related piece of effective
become home to “the vanguard of the well-to-do”. additional significance when it reappears in a symbolism – he describes the building as an
For the somewhat inarticulate Wilder, denied Roegian montage as the high-rise enters another “unconscious design of some sort of psychiatric
access to the upper floors, the whole edifice must stage of “collusive madness” – and it may well have event” – he eventually gives up trying to paint
be torn down; for Laing, whose social status is been inspired by the real Laing, who wrote in The the exposed concrete ducts in his apartment
more ambiguous, Royal’s original conception
was misguided, since it allowed the traditional
class divisions to reassert themselves, but not
irredeemable. In Laing’s view, and eventually
in Royal’s, the high-rise’s inhabitants’ seeming
descent into barbarism is actually a first step
towards freedom, fulfilling their unconscious
expectations. At the end, Royal wonders whether
he may unwittingly have brought into being
a “paradigm for future developments”; and his
murder by Wilder confirms his hypothesis by
enabling Laing to occupy his new self to the full.
Laing’s name is almost certainly meant to
echo that of the radical (or anti-) psychiatrist R.D.
Laing, who wrote in 1967’s The Politics of Experience
that “humanity is estranged from its authentic
possibilities”, that “our collusive madness is what
we call sanity” and that the “fundamental human Observation tower: at key moments, the action is shown through the eyes of a child, Toby (Louis Suc)

64 | Sight&Sound | April 2016

 reading is that, from Toby’s youthful standpoint,
Thatcher holds out the promise of change.
However, Toby’s point of view doesn’t dominate

FILMS OF THE MONTH

the film, which is too often larky in tone rather
than menacing or mysterious. Perhaps it is
inevitable that, in the age of sexting, some of
what Ballard imagined now seems like old-world
courtesy, but much of High-Rise resembles a
grubby, all-too-human swingers’ party more than
the birth of a new civilisation fit for “an advanced
species of machine” as Ballard puts it in the
novel. Moreover, the tonal uncertainty leads to a
disastrous lapse of judgement, when Charlotte’s
rape by Wilder is given a soundtrack of Portishead
slowly and mournfully travestying Abba’s ‘SOS’.
All in all, the most interesting departures
from Ballard are made too fitfully, and the least
welcome too boldly. The thick period fidelity
is sometimes a distraction; if we are meant to
believe that Hiddleston’s character is following
a “logic more powerful than reason”, as he says
in voiceover at the end, then the 1970s set-
dressing and entry-level political gloss are
unnecessary. Summing up his difference from
his contemporaries in an interview with Will
Self, Ballard once said: “What I am not interested
in is what happened 20 years ago.” Whereas
Ballard’s vision of a world irrevocably transformed
by technology and pharmacology remains
bracing in its deliberate excision of feeling and
its disregard for conventional pieties, Wheatley’s
reconstruction of the lost England of 40 years
ago cossets rather than disturbs its assumed
audience, never more so than when dragging
on Thatcher at the end as a kind of diabolus ex
machina that everyone can be expected to boo.

Tom Hiddleston’s Dr Robert

Laing is a prototypical yuppie,
perfectly attuned to the regime
of anomie and anonymity

and allows the building’s logic to take over. Credits and Synopsis
At some significant points the action is shown
through the eyes of a child, Toby (Louis Suc),
Produced by Odile Dicks-Mireaux A film by Ben Executive Producers Richard Wilder Stacy Martin
illegitimate son of Royal and Charlotte Melville Jeremy Thomas Wheatley Peter Watson Elisabeth Moss Fay
(Sienna Miller), the latter of whom becomes Written by ©RPC High-Rise Made with the partial Thorsten Schumacher Helen Wilder Tony Way
Amy Jump Limited, The British assistance of the Lizzie Francke James Purefoy Robert the caretaker
Laing’s occasional lover. Children are a source of Based on the novel Film Institute, Channel European Regional Sam Lavender Pangbourne Leila Mimmack
special resentment for the upper-storey residents, by J.G. Ballard Four Television Development Fund Anna Higgs Keeley Hawes Laura
Director of Corporation through Northern Gabriella Martinelli Ann Bill Paterson
in both book and film, and the adoption of Toby’s Photography Production Ireland Screen Christopher Simon Peter Ferdinando Mercer
point of view – also perhaps the view of child-of- Laurie Rose Companies Produced by Backwell Geneviève Lemal Cosgrove Louis Suc
Edited by Jeremy Thomas, Productions Limited Sienna Guillory Toby
the-1970s Wheatley – is a telling departure that Amy Jump HanWay Films, Film4 Developed with the Jane
could be interpreted as a check on Ballard’s ironic Ben Wheatley and BFI present in support of Film4 Cast Reece Shearsmith In Colour
but still discernibly libertarian perspective on the Production Designer association with With support from Tom Hiddleston Steele [2.35:1]
Mark Tildesley Northern Ireland the Tax Shelter of Dr Robert Laing Enzo Cilenti
decadence he depicts. A slight note of accusation, Music Composed by Screen, Ingenious the Belgian Federal Jeremy Irons Talbot Distributor
unsounded in Ballard, may be heard when Clint Mansell Media, Scope Government via Anthony Royal Augustus Prew Studiocanal Limited
Sound Designer Pictures and S Films Scope Invest Sienna Miller Munrow
Toby discovers his mother and Laing in flagrante Martin Pavey a Recorded Picture Made with the support Charlotte Melville Dan Skinner
delicto – in the novel they wait till he’s asleep. Costume Designer Company production of the BFI’s Film Fund Luke Evans Simmons
In this way perhaps, and certainly in others, the
London, 1975. Physiology lecturer Robert Laing moves Young father Richard Wilder, a television documentary
partial adoption of Toby’s viewpoint is central to into an apartment halfway up an exclusive new high-rise maker, blaming Royal for the high-rise’s malign
Jump and Wheatley’s decision to ground High-Rise development that seems to be isolated from the rest of atmosphere and worsening condition, ascends the
in history. During the film’s first party, Toby is seen the world. Soon he becomes sexually involved with near- building and rapes Charlotte, before being caught by
in his bedroom putting together a radio kit; in the neighbour Charlotte Melville, and is taken up socially Royal’s henchmen. Laing analyses him but refuses
final shot he is listening to a recording of Thatcher by the building’s penthouse-dwelling architect Anthony to lobotomise him, on the grounds that his rebellion
Royal, father of Charlotte’s son Toby; however, he is against the building is rational. Over dinner with Laing,
arguing in a Commons debate of November
shunned by the other residents of the upper floors. The Royal, initially disappointed that his egalitarian designs
1976 that “there is only one economic system in building’s physical and social infrastructure starts to for the high-rise have been betrayed by its residents,
the world, and that is capitalism”, the important break down and life degenerates into a permanent orgy. arrives at the view that he may well have liberated
difference being between state capitalism and Animosities between the different levels of the building them after all. Later, Wilder goes up to the top floor
private capitalism. This seems to be intended to lead to violence. In particular, denizens of the upper and kills Royal, and is in turn killed by Royal’s wife
provide a clinching explanation for the high-rise’s levels resent the children of the lower-level residents, Ann and her friends. Laing, content, looks forward to
and the building goes into terminal decline after a the neighbouring high-rises submitting to the same
transformation, and to make explicit the privatised children’s party in a swimming pool gets out of hand. irrational impulses that have consumed his.
nature of the new ‘paradigm’. But a dissident

April 2016 | Sight&Sound | 65