High-Rise
Director: Ben Wheatley
Talent: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Elisabeth Moss, Luke Evans
Release Date: 18th March 2016
Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, like the JG Ballard novel of which it is an adaptation, has all the superficial qualities of a political allegory, centred around a single, high-rise apartment building – a utopian architectural project, class stratifications from lower to higher floors, men’s violence towards women (and children), interpersonal disputes over order, cleanliness, etc. – except that none of it really makes any sense. That is to say, it feels like a satire, but of what it is not particularly clear. Is it the ascendant neoliberal capitalism of the late 1970s? Is it the socialist naïveté of architectural modernism? All this remains vague and perhaps deliberately unclear, like Le Corbusier himself, friend and foe to fascist and radical alike.
Observe the symbolic register at which this film operates: Robert Laing (Hiddlestone) is a neurosurgeon seeking total anonymity in a newly-built high-rise apartment building whose upper floors juts and leans ominously outwards in a stepped shape. Other notable occupants include Wilder (Evans), a drunken cameraman obsessed with injustice, his wife (Moss), pregnant with a child that seemingly refuses to be born, a nervous psychiatrist seen early on thumbing a copy of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the building’s increasingly misanthropic, mandarin-collared architect (Irons) who lives on the top floor, a seductive, sexually-charged female neighbour who knows everyone and everything in the building, and her shy, scopophilic son Toby, who has no father (or does he?). And what happens to these loaded signifiers? Well, they all just kill one another, basically.
Ballard’s book, and Wheatley’s film after it, is what you get when you talk about class without talking about its fundamental structuring component: exploitation. It’s a fun, weird mess, but it has the constant, niggling feeling of someone bluffing their way through something they don’t understand, or perhaps don’t want to. It doesn’t work as allegory, and it barely works as a narrative, but it certainly entertains while doing so.
Words: Oisin Murphy-Hall
