Review: High-Rise

Doctor Tom Hiddleston moves into a fancy new high-rise apartment building designed by Mr. Royal (Jeremy Irons) who also lives there with his wife (Keeley Hawes). The building has around 2,000 residents. Hiddleston lives on the upper-middle level of the building and there is a class divide from top to bottom. Also in the building are single mum Sienna Miller, foul-tempered documentarian Luke Evans and his heavily pregnant wife Elisabeth Moss, and creepy top floor resident and gynaecologist James Purefoy. Things go swimmingly at first, but then the power starts going out from time to time, the trash starts to pile up, and chaos eventually breaks out with people starting to behave like animals.

J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel has been said to be ‘unfilmable’, and this 2016 adaptation from director Ben Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump (who previously collaborated on the dreadfully dull “Kill List”) would seem to support that notion. I haven’t read the novel, but I have to imagine it works a whole helluva lot better than this mess. Playing like a pretentious Orwellian tale mixed with a subpar upper-crust British version of “The Divide”, there may have been something worthy here but it’s snooty, austere, and so very much not my thing.

It took forever for me to find my bearings here before realising I didn’t much care. No one really seems normal at the outset (nor is anyone below middle-class, really. Many of those in the ‘lower’ classes still seem pretty upper-crust to me), and the lack of remotely sympathetic characters is a real nail in the coffin. Why should I have cared about any of these creeps, snobs, and weirdos? In book form it’s probably more compelling but Jeremy Irons meets “Lord of the Flies” is not my idea of fun at all. I found it a very difficult experience, and I certainly hope the book is a lot more coherent because this is pretty elusive in parts. I mean, you’re pretty much thrown into the middle of things without much in the way of set-up. I have to assume the book gives us more than this, though I eventually did pick up that the film was taking place in an alternate 1970s Britain at least. Tom Hiddleston might just make it as 007 should they choose to go down that path, but I didn’t find him especially good here, nor anyone else for that matter. It’s not their fault though, this just doesn’t work on screen, at least not on evidence here. The kind of film where if you don’t get onto its wavelength fairly early, 110 minutes will go by agonisingly slowly.

It’ll be someone’s cup of tea, just not remotely mine. I don’t do snooty and austere, and this high-brow “Lord of the Flies” is extremely unpleasant and off-putting to boot. Watch “The Divide” instead, it’s the same basic idea and equally unpleasant, but far better told and far more effective.

Rating: D+