High-Rise

“Some­times he found it dif­fi­cult to believe in a future that had not already tak­en place.” In Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, this line appears as an intro­duc­to­ry voice-over from pro­tag­o­nist Robert Laing (Tom Hid­dle­ston), who, three months after he has moved into the tit­u­lar tow­er block, is tak­ing stock and scrib­bling down his recent experiences.

One sure sign of the self-alien­at­ing trans­for­ma­tion that Laing has under­gone since his arrival is the fact that he now refers to him­self in the third per­son. Anoth­er is the spec­ta­cle of him calm­ly bar­be­cu­ing and eat­ing a dog on his filth-strewn 25^th-floor apart­ment bal­cony. Mean­while, Laing’s words, with their con­fu­sion of past, present and future, clear­ly set out the film’s sta­tus as a work of post­mod­ernism, as much a dizzy­ing blue­print for who we are today as it is a for­ward-look­ing alle­go­ry of the fes­ter­ing polit­i­cal divi­sions of 1970s Britain.

Laing had moved into this new bru­tal­ist edi­fice as ​“an invest­ment in the future”, but in order to under­stand how his stay there has end­ed up in such unre­strained mad­ness, we must revis­it the events that took place in the inter­ven­ing quar­ter. Accord­ing­ly the film too is Janus-faced, look­ing back­wards and for­wards, up and down, to take in the tower’s panoram­ic purview. Itself set in 1975, High-Rise glances back to the homony­mous 1975 nov­el by JG Bal­lard – but it can also look for­ward (with hind­sight) to the prime min­is­ter­ship (com­menc­ing in 1979) of Mar­garet Thatch­er and her pro­gramme of des­o­cial­is­ing pri­vati­sa­tion that has cre­at­ed the world in which we now all live. The pri­vate build­ing after which the film is named, with its built-in gym, pool and super­mar­ket, is a her­met­ic world unto itself, a micro­cosm of society’s rigid class structures.

Even if the build­ing was con­ceived by its archi­tect Roy­al (Jere­my Irons) as ​“a cru­cible for change”, the same old hier­ar­chies keep recon­sti­tut­ing them­selves. The work­ing class – embod­ied by unem­ployed doc­u­men­tar­i­an Wilder (Luke Evans), his seri­al­ly preg­nant wife Helen (Elis­a­beth Moss) and their ever-expand­ing brood of chil­dren – occu­py the ​“low­er lev­els”. At the oth­er extreme, Roy­al him­self lives in the 40^th-floor pent­house, nos­tal­gi­cal­ly remod­elled by his aris­to­crat­ic wife Ann (Kee­ley Hawes) to resem­ble her child­hood ​“coun­try home” (com­plete with farm ani­mals) so that she can ​“reassert her­self on the rung”. In between are the pro­fes­sion­al mid­dle class­es – peo­ple like Laing who, in keep­ing with his career as a phys­i­ol­o­gist, looks upon the build­ing as a liv­ing organ­ism with its own pathologies.

As Wheat­ley (Kill List, A Field in Eng­land) doc­u­ments the break­down and restora­tion of order in a build­ing that is, as Roy­al puts it, ​“still set­tling”, there is some­thing decid­ed­ly kalei­do­scop­ic about the entire enter­prise. Dia­logue and sounds leak from one scene into the next; Lau­rie Rose’s mobile, often hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry cin­e­matog­ra­phy swirls and reels, tak­ing in the build­ing and its many res­i­dents from all angles; and the metaphor of par­ty pol­i­tics is realised in a series of actu­al gath­er­ings where class comes out to dance.

Unable to com­pre­hend why his archi­tec­tur­al exper­i­ment has not result­ed in the great social meta­mor­pho­sis that he had intend­ed, Roy­al at first sup­pos­es that he has omit­ted some ​“vital ele­ment” – but by the end, amidst a vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion in which no real change takes place, he realis­es, ​“It wasn’t that I left an ele­ment out – it was that I put too many in.” This rep­re­sents a note of self-con­scious self-cri­tique from a film that mix­es com­e­dy and hor­ror, the satir­i­cal and the scat­o­log­i­cal, the high and the low, into a dis­ori­ent­ing, dystopic mess, and asks us to rev­el in the beau­ti­ful, bewil­der­ing chaos of its man­i­fold elements.

As the grand archi­tect behind this fol­ly, Wheat­ley has craft­ed a sub­lime com­plex that accom­mo­dates all man­ner of uncom­fort­able ideas about the atavism and entropy of modern(ist) liv­ing. With its bes­tial behav­iours and car­ni­va­lesque capers in a ​’70s milieu, the film would make an excel­lent dou­ble-fea­ture with Aaaaaaaah!, direct­ed by Wheatley’s friend Steve Oram.

Yet High-Rise also stands on its own as a macabre mythol­o­gi­sa­tion of the lib­er­tine excess­es to be found in both the human heart and the free mar­ket – of any era. Watch­ing it is like see­ing a mul­ti-sto­ried clas­sic rich­ly unrav­el­ling before, dur­ing and after its prop­er time. Such is the den­si­ty of its dif­fer­ent lev­els that repeat view­ings will be amply reward­ed – although cin­ema­go­ers will be unlike­ly to main­tain Laing’s mid­dle posi­tion on the film’s many polar­is­ing provocations.