Your response to Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise will depend on your appreciation for the other films in his body of work. Meaning: The less you like them, the more you’ll enjoy High Rise, and vice versa. High-Rise begins with the past tense of Wheatley’s traditional mayhem, settling on tranquil scenes of extensive carnage and brutal violence inflicted before the picture’s start. Dashing Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) wanders waste-strewn halls. He goes to have a drink with his neighbor, Nathan Steele (Reece Shearsmith), who has enshrined a dead man’s head within a television set. Seems about right. But the film’s displays of squalor and viscera are a ruse. Spoken in the tongue of Wheatley, High-Rise is a tamer tale than Kill List or Sightseers.
That isn’t a bad thing, of course, but if you go into Wheatley films anticipating unhinged barbarity, you may feel as though the film and its creator are trolling you here. High-Rise is based on English novelist’s J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel of the same name, a soft sci-fi dystopian yarn fastened to a through line of social examination. In context with its decade, the book’s setting could be roughly described as “near future England,” and Wheatley, a director with a keen sense of time and place across all of his films, has kept the period of the text’s publication intact, fleshing it out with alternately lush and dreggy mise en scène. If you didn’t know any better, you might assume that High-Rise is a lost relic of 1970s American cinema.
Or maybe you wouldn’t think that at all. Whether he sets his movies in the 17th century or in the present day, Wheatley’s style is modern right down to its referentialism: Among his influences we can count directors like John Boorman, David Cronenberg, Terry Gilliam and Stanley Kubrick, named last on this list because too often critics and cinephiles forget that there are other filmmakers in the history of the medium besides Stanley Kubrick. Wheatley is the sum total of their parts, but over the course of directing five features and countless episodes on a handful of television series, he has also developed his own point of view as an artist—even when he’s adapting stories written by another author. High-Rise is Ballard’s book, but it’s Wheatley’s movie.
The film unfolds within the dispassionate concrete embrace of the luxury skyscraper evoked by its title. Our perspective is anchored to Laing (Hiddleston)—doctor, medical lecturer, eligible bachelor and grieving brother—who has moved into the building to escape the world and its myriad inconveniences. Why drive to the grocery store when you can hop on a lift and buy goods from the market nestled within your apartment complex? Why go to the gym when you can just head to the in-house rec center? Why trek to a concert when you can meet celebrities while you shop for produce? The high-rise has it all: Ease of living, colorful inhabitants (played by Luke Evans, Sienna Miller, Elisabeth Moss and Shearsmith). Its architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), has ensured that his tenants have little to no reason to leave other than to attend work, and even that proves a flimsy excuse to depart the tower’s array of pleasures and indulgences.