Ben
Wheatley Reaches for the Sky in High-Rise
High-Rise - Review
UK, 2016/ Cert 15/ 119 mins
Director: Ben Wheatley
Cast: Tom Hiddlestone, Jeremy Irons,
Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy.
Ben
Wheatley made his debut in 2009 with the gritty documentary-style realism of Down
Terrace, a gangster thriller shot for a mere £20,000 in the director’s
hometown of Brighton. With High-Rise- an adaptation of the allegedly “unfilmable”
J G Ballard novel- Wheatley has earned the right to considerably expand his budget.
The film, featuring an A-list cast, still cost a relatively modest £6 million, but
it does demonstrate Wheatley stepping up a league to comfortably prove his
talents are not confined to low budget fare. Although High-Rise may have polarised critical opinion surely no one can
seriously call into question its sheer audacity? The film, like the Brutalist high-rise
apartment of its setting, aims for the firmament. However, it also shows its
tenants and, by inference modernity itself, heading for a fall.
High Rise’s producer, Jeremy Thomas, has
wanted to bring Ballard’s novel to the screen since its publication. In the
late 1970s he managed to get the director Nicholas Roeg on board but the film
failed to materialise. Wheatley admits that he was unaware of the Roeg
connection but he was acquainted with the fact that Thomas resurrected the idea
in the 1990s, this time with Vincenzo Natali (Cypher, Splice) directing
from a script by Richard Stanley. In the same way that David Cronenberg
switched the setting of his filmed version of Ballard’s Crash (1996) from London to Toronto, Natali’s adaptation of High-Rise was set to relocate the
apartment to an island in the Pacific. Again, the film never saw the light of
day. But now at last, Thomas has seen his dream of Ballard’s dystopian
nightmare transferred to the screen and the result is staggeringly brilliant. High-Rise
is such a vertiginously joyous experience that I emerged from the theatre after
viewing the film reeling from its bravura to such an extent that I suspected
that my popcorn may have been laced with amphetamine.
High-Rise
opens with its central character, Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddlestone), eating
roasted Alsatian on his apartment balcony with the voice-over informing us that "For all its inconveniencies, Laing was satisfied with life in the high-rise." The
remainder of the film’s narrative relates the characters’ atavistic degeneration, via one continuous flashback, beginning three months earlier at the time that
Laing first moved into the tower block. Laing remains an enigma in the film and
Hiddlestone succeeds in bringing all of his character’s contradictions to life.
Laing is an innocent who seemingly gets drawn into the events against his
better judgement. Taking the moral high ground, he steps in to offer protection
when the violence threatens to get out control. Nevertheless, Laing remains a
willing participant in the brutality. He is a self-confessed “quick learner”
and his breakdown sees him increasingly neglect his work as he gives in to the
high-rise’s decadent influence, drinking heavily whilst embarking upon two
affairs with Charlotte Melville, lasciviously played by Sienna Miller, and the
heavily pregnant Helen Wilder (Elisabeth Moss).
The apartment block resembles a city in the sky, an architectural
concept that offers all the modern amenities that could be found within the urban
environment. Residents can enjoy a megastore, gymnasium, swimming pools, spa,
restaurant and a school. Unfortunately its high-speed elevators, refuse and
electrical systems experience faults and it is the failure of these vital
services, mere “breathing problems" according to the building’s architect,
Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), which provide the catalyst for a wanton descent
into licentiousness, violence and murder.
Wild bacchanalian parties continue long into the night with
drink and drugs on tap as the residents unleash their latent hedonistic
impulses. Couples brazenly have sex in the corridors and at one of the ostentatious
parties thrown by Royal which deteriorates into full-blown orgy, one woman
shouts, “Now which one of you bastards is going to fuck me up the arse.” As the
trash begins to pile up in the corridors and entire floors of the building are
left without electricity, supplies begin to run short in the supermarket,
leading competing floors to form rival gangs to fight for goods and services. With
the floors representing a de facto social hierarchy– the higher up the building
the higher the status of the residents- this conflict becomes a pseudo class
war and social climbing by all means necessary becomes the natural order.
After being informed by Laing that a PET scan has indicated
that he has a problem with his brain, Munroe (Augustus Prew), a trainee doctor
at the hospital where Laing works, throws himself to his death from the
building. Unconcerned by the tragic turn of events, the residents continue on
their saturnalian trail of self-destruction. Later, the savage battle for
hegemony begins when the filmmaker Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) drowns the pet
dog belonging to the faded actress, Jane Sheridan (Sienna Guillory), in the
swimming pool. When considering the drowning alongside the butchering and
eating of the animals in the film, one may feel entitled to ask what have dogs
done to offend Wheatley and his script-writing partner Amy Jump that their
films relish in punishing the creatures to such a sadistic extent? Who can
forget the mistreatment of Banjo, the Jack Russell, stolen from his owners and
eventually abandoned in Sightseers?
There is a pervasive and insidious malevolence throughout
much of Wheatley’s oeuvre. Talking to Mark Kermode about his second feature, the
director says “Watching Kill List (2011), I do think, ‘Fuck, I was mean’.
It’s a cruel film…. ‘Jesus it’s so angry’. But then I think High-Rise is
too, in the end.”[i]
Wheatley certainly has a point. There appears to be a singular trope of callousness
throughout his films to date, whether it is the parenticidal bleakness of Down
Terrace, the brutal genre-bending Kill List, the
aforementioned Sightseers which comes across like it is the result of Sam
Peckinpah spending a long weekend in a caravan with Mike Leigh, or the
sinister, psychedelic, trippy-horror-freak-out of A Field in England (2013).
Thematically High-Rise continues in this vein, exploring the dark and
disturbing hinterlands of human psychology. T.S Eliot’s poem, ‘Whispers of
Mortality’, describes the dramatist John Webster’s theatre as revealing “the
skull beneath the skin” and there is certainly a touch of Jacobean tragedy in
Wheatley’s cinema. In fact, High-Rise indirectly mirrors Eliot’s famous
phrase when Laing performs an educational autopsy, slicing open a forehead and
violently ripping back the flesh to show the skull and face to his students. One
of the factors which make Wheatley’s films so memorable is that they contain
many such striking images with narratives that viscerally peel away the
repressed subconscious. But, despite the juxtaposition of viscosity and comedy,
the recurring violence in his movies is rarely played for laughs. Although High-Rise’s
perceptive satire upon modernity and ubiquitous nature of modern capitalism is riotously
funny, there is a constant shift in tone between its dark humour and its
ferocious, brutish violence. Although the film offers no rationale nor neat
resolution to explain the characters’ regression towards anarchy, the scenes of
rape and murder in High-Rise may be hard to stomach but they are never
exploitative.
The dystopian element of both novel and film could be argued
in a variety of ways. The isolation of the tenants and the encroachment of an
increasingly virulent capitalism lead to an intensification of class-division
and rampant individualism, impelling the characters to reject the accepted
ethical code in favour of a sexual, violent, free-for-all which ultimately
confirms the Thatcherite aphorism that “there is no such thing as society.” Similarly, references to Social Darwinism are constantly evoked. However,
Ballard and Wheatley eschew didacticism in favour of creating a sense of
alienation and apart from one reference to Margaret Thatcher at the film’s
climax, the issue of causality is merely hinted at within the narrative.
The Brutalist architecture of the skyscraper itself could
also be considered as contributing to the de-humanising effect. Ballard’s work
has been remarkably prescient in relation to modern technological and
industrial advances and most of his fiction deals with modernity rather than the
usual spaceship and aliens stuff often associated with science fiction. Ballard
was particularly interested in the interaction between technology, the
environment and individual psychology and High-Rise highlights his
fascination with modern architecture and how design aesthetics can influence
human behaviour. As one character announces in Ballard’s short story ‘Low
Flying Aircraft’: “The ultimate dystopia is in the inside of one’s own head.”
One of the major themes of the novel successfully conveyed
by the film is the fact that the high-rise apartment becomes a character in
itself. The tenement block becomes a living, breathing creature, a brooding
leviathan which looms over the viewer’s imagination and exerts its malevolent
influence over those who dwell inside. Similarly,
the interior of the apartment block are imaginatively and stylishly presented.
The retro apartments are minimally furnished, chic and spacious and in its
representation of the supermarket, the film shuns realism for a 1970s hyper-reality
that is resonant with the style of Kubrick. In fact the initial shots of the
hotel corridors are reminiscent of The Overlook hotel in The Shining, another
film where the setting takes on a monstrous character of its own to manipulate
Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance.
Meticulous attention to detail has been paid on High-Rise
and credit must go to the cinematographer Laurie Rose and the Arts Department
led by Mark Tildesley (Production Design), Frank Walsh, Nigel Pollock (Art
Direction) Paki Smith (Set Decoration) and Odile Dicks-Mireaux (Costume
Design). The film is sumptuous to look at with images that linger long in the
memory and will undoubtedly benefit from multiple viewings as there is too much
to visually take in at one time. Munroe’s slow-motion suicidal leap from the 39th
floor is particularly impressive as are the shots from inside the elevators
where multiple mirrors achieve a kaleidoscopic effect which is echoed when Toby
Melville (Louis Suc) views the mayhem of the apartment block through his toy
kaleidoscope. By concentrating more on Toby’s character, the film departs
slightly from the novel, focusing upon the children residing in the high-rise
and becoming a reversal of The Lord of
the Flies with the adults reverting to barbarism and Toby, a representative
of childhood innocence, observing their feral disintegration. When asked by Laing
what he sees through his kaleidoscope, Toby replies, “The future.” This is
later emphasised when we see the boy listening to his self-made radio
broadcasting a speech by Margaret Thatcher eulogising upon the virtues of capitalism.
In addition to focusing on the children, the film also
places emphasis on the female residents which rescues it from any accusations
of misogyny. Despite being assaulted, raped and confined into servitude, the
denouement suggests that any escape from the anarchy of the high-rise will
ultimately be the responsibility of the women. Although the film does not have
a happy ending, its ambiguity does not entirely reject the possibility of
redemption.
One of the ways in which Jump’s script has remained loyal to
its source material is in choosing to place the action in the mid-1970s, the
period in which the book was published. Some critics have raised their eyebrows
at this, but the decision made by Wheatley and Jump is vindicated on a number
of levels. Firstly, by setting the film just before the election of the
Conservatives in 1979 when the Thatcherite revolution began to dismantle the
postwar consensus, the social and political elements are foregrounded into the
film. Secondly, although Ballard has been described as a science fiction author,
much of his writing resists such simple generic classification. “I was
interested in the real future that I could see approaching, and less in the
invented future that science fiction preferred”[ii]
, Ballard once said, claiming his stories were set in the “visionary present.”[iii] This is discernible in the filmed adaptation of High-Rise with its 1970s timescale acting as a comment upon the
present social climate, rather than a prophecy of a distant future. Both film
and book have an immediacy which makes their brutality even more disturbing.
One of the most prescient features in Ballard’s High-Rise is its anticipation of the gentrification
of London which has intensified into a form of social cleansing of areas of the
capital. We see this in the social make-up of the residents which has totally excluded
the working class, consisting purely of various stratifications of the middle class,
all competing to climb the vertical hierarchical order. On the lower floors dwell
the less affluent sections of the middle class, typified by Wilder, a filmmaker
prone to outbursts of sudden, senseless violence, whose degeneration is
emphasised when his wife serves him a can of dog food for his dinner. Wilder’s
initial revolt against the services provided for the lower floors turns
increasingly brutal as he first decides to film the events in the high-rise for
one of his documentaries before abandoning the project to climb the building in
an attempt to murder the architect.
Irons is perfectly cast as the sleazy Royal, his performance
a comical blend of amorality and eccentricity. The architectural Ubermensch
resides on the 40th floor, the zenith of his own creation and is described
in the film as being “intent on colonising the sky.” Initially his Nietzschean Will
to Power is unquestioned by his henchmen who are happy to use strong-arm
tactics to cement his authority. But as events in the high-rise begin to spiral
out of control, he becomes, in his own words, “The architect of my own
accident”, and his acolytes become increasingly unruly and disobedient. Royal finally
relinquishes his power, claiming that his architectural creation has become a
“crucible for change” in which all social, political and moral authority is challenged
by primal individualism.
High-Rise can be read as part social satire, and part philosophical
tussle between Apollonian Reason and Dionysian anti-rationalism where
humanity’s repressed desires come to the fore and the id, gloriously unleashed, is
allowed to run riot. At one point towards the end of the film, Royal is served
a meal consisting of some unspecified meat. Is it dog? Or horse? Or even worse?
Perhaps it is human? We never find out. But rarely in the cinema has evolutionary
regression appeared as carnally sexy as the moment when, in close-up, Sienna
Miller scoops the meat into her hands to chomp it down, provocatively revealing
her teeth in a Darwinian snarl of contempt. The film could also be regarded as
dramatising the Fall of Man with the residents rejecting civilisation for
anarchy and order for chaos. There are repeated shots of characters and objects
hanging or falling from the building, from Munroe’s suicide to slow-motion
poetic imagery of glasses, bottles and other detritus recklessly thrown from
the balconies. This metaphor is subtly extended by the inclusion of the song ‘Industrial
Estate’ by the Mancunian post-punk outfit The Fall, featured just before the closing
credits.
The music for the film was composed by ex- Pop Will Eat
Itself front man and Grammy and Golden Globe nominee Clint Mansell who ingeniously keeps
the 1970s theme alive by including a string arrangement of Abba’s ‘S.O.S.’ which becomes part of the diegesis, when performed at one of Royal’s lavish parties.
‘S.O.S.’ was a top ten hit for the Swedish pop group in the same year that Ballard’s
High-Rise was published and is reprised later in the film with Portishead having recorded a version
especially for Wheatley, subsequently declaring that it can only be heard in the
movie as it will not be released in any other format. Their version of the song
- the first recording the band have made for six years- complements the action
perfectly, its brooding synths and Beth Gibbins’ vocal suggestive of mental disintegration, reflecting the psychological and social breakdown we are witnessing upon the
screen.
As High-Rise races
frantically towards its brutal climax and events become increasingly chaotic,
the film incredibly manages to retain its composure. It is owing to the intelligence
of the filmmakers, script and the fine performances that help High-Rise keep a tight rein over its
action never becoming too over-the-top to defy common sense. Despite its
insanity, there is a perverted and wholly satisfying logic to the depravity depicted.
Expect more mayhem in Wheatley’s next film- his first to be
set in the US- a gangland shootout starring Cillian Murphy and Brie Larson.
Already in the can, Free Fire, is released
later this year. Meanwhile, High-Rise’s
stylish exuberance confirms Wheatley as the most exciting filmmaker in the
country at the moment.
Now, how would you like your Alsatian?
.webp)
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