Movie Review: 'High-Rise'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Here's a glimpse into the possible near future that makes us despondent about our species.
High-Rise, adapted from the 1975 satirical novel about urban living by J.G. Ballard, is set in a luxury condominium on the outskirts of London in the mid-1970s.
Designed by the interestingly named Anthony Royal, played by Jeremy Irons, it's known as the High Life, a self-sufficient residential apartment building with a spa, a gym, a squash court, a swimming pool, and a fully stocked supermarket.
Why, folks could just stay home all the time. And it appears that quite a few of them are doing just that.
One of them is Doctor Robert Laing, the protagonist played by Tom Hiddleston. Having lost his sister recently, he decided to make a new start, moved in here, and, but for going to work, he too pretty much stays in the building.
The film opens with Robert in some form of distracted disarray, then flashes back several months to show us how he got this way.
It turns out that this sparkling, ultra-modern, well-appointed, but strangely oppressive-looking building developed a number of problems that got worse long before they got better – which they never did.
For one thing, there's a vertical social hierarchy in that the elite live on the high floors while the peons live on the low floors.
Way up top, in the penthouse, the building's designer, Anthony Royal, and his wife live as if in a French castle in an earlier century.
Ordinary creatures like the documentarian played by Luke Evans and his pregnant wife, played by Elisabeth Moss, live modestly on the lower levels.
And on the middle floors are the hedonistic revelers, where, for example, Robert's neighbor, the single-mom-party-girl played by Sienna Miller lives.
But as far as resident services go, inequity is everywhere.
So, when the building's infrastructure fails, it's the lower floors that bear the brunt. When there are power outages, it's the lower floors that are most affected. When the supermarket runs out of food, it's the lower-floor residents who are most seriously deprived.
And that's when and why chaos ensues and a building-wide conflict begins. Suddenly, the High Life is a hotbed of anarchy and violence.
The allegory the makers are shooting for, with this building as a microcosm of society, may be interesting to think about, but the film remains too vague, disjointed, and theoretical for us to feel any kind of emotional investment.
There are too many unanswered questions (Why does no one leave? Where are the police?) and not enough context for the extreme behaviors on display as the building turns into a wasteland.
Director Ben Wheatley (Down Terrace, Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England) and screenwriter Amy Jump are frequent collaborators and, on this project, served as co-editors. Which may explain why the film so often, as if to document the editing skills on display, offers dark, frenetic montages detailing the mayhem and destruction instead of allowing us to learn anything of note about the characters.
And lest anyone think that this kind of material cannot register clearly and entertainingly, take a look at 2014's brilliant, thematically similar and significantly superior Snowpiercer.
Meanwhile, we'll take the elevator to 2 stars out of 4. As movies go, High-Rise is low-rent.
