High-Rise (2015)

J. G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-Rise had been long regarded as unfilmable, and maybe it really is unfilmable and that's why I had a hard time determining how I felt about its film version. This dystopian film whose general aura and production design make it look like a lost Stanley Kubrick work, is the story of a young Dr. Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) who moves into a new 40 story luxury apartment tower on the outskirts of London in the mid 1970's. Shortly after moving into the tower conditions start to deteriorate, power and other supplies become increasingly unreliable and the residents start to faction off based largely on class lines, with the poorer residents already living near the bottom of the tower and the wealthier near the top, Dr. Laing lives on the 25th floor and is something of a bridge between these two camps. The story is essentially a metaphor for both the breakdown of a society and the persistence of the mundane. While the high-rise essentially becomes a third world failed state, a decadent place full of both orgies and murder with residents living in barbarous conditions, Dr. Laing and many of the other residents continue to commute to work each morning as if nothing has happened, refusing to move out of their homes while their brains become increasingly unhinged and life increasingly more precarious. This is not a pleasant film, I mostly did not enjoy watching it, but that feeling of unease and sometimes even disgust is what the story intends to communicate.  The film has a strong cast including Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller and Elisabeth Moss and is capably directed by Ben Wheatley, a man whose done a lot of his work in advertising, internet clips and television, but is also in development on a new sci-fi series for HBO which I am sure at the very least will look amazing. This is certainly not a film for everybody. ***