In the 1970s, people called high-rise buildings slums built up into the sky, and now film-maker Ben Wheatley has built the 1970s out into the future. His new film High-Rise is a bizarre spectacle, sleek and seedy and mad: a world of sideburns, brutalist concrete and shag-pile carpeting matted with fag ash and blood. Very strange, very Sanderson. It’s closer to an installation of non-narrative freakiness and outrageous self-indulgence. This indulgence is the film’s flaw, but it is also in some way its subject.

Wheatley (the director of disturbing movies such as Sightseers and Kill List) and his screenwriter Amy Jump have adapted JG Ballard’s cult novel from 1975 about a state-of-the-art residential tower block whose inhabitants succumb to a collective nervous breakdown, apparently as a result of the building itself. Designed to anticipate every rational human need, it has somehow only succeeded in triggering the tenants’ subconscious desire for chaos and destruction, a need to vandalise its supposed perfection.

The book has always struck me as at least as unfilmable as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, but High-Rise the movie has been a project that producer Jeremy Thomas has been nursing these 30 years, originally with Nic Roeg in mind to direct. Now it is Ben Wheatley at the helm. With production designer Mark Tildesley and cinematographer Laurie Rose, he shows a knack for reproducing the cool, cruel shape of Ballard’s imagination: a blank, affectless world with a certain type of sci-fi-satirical Englishness. It is eerily calm, whatever Hogarthian excess is going on, populated by male characters who address each other curtly by their surnames, like public schoolboys. Their behaviour seems to proceed on terms other than the cause-and-effect basis of ordinary human motivation. Its main character is described as “thriving like an advanced species in the neutral atmosphere”. At its best, the film thrives in the same way.

The scene is the 1970s, or some futureworld 1970s on a planet similar to ours. Tom Hiddleston gives a well-judged performance as the lead character; dry and self-possessed, he is a young surgeon named Laing, perhaps in homage to RD Laing, magus of the anti-psychiatry movement. A well-off single man, he takes one of the bachelor flats near the top of a colossal new apartment block in an out-of-town development of five new buildings. Laing is instantly aware of a class conflict in his tower: poorer tenants live in cheaper flats on the floors beneath, yet because service charges are the same throughout the building, the lower orders feel disproportionately aggrieved by the electricity cutting out and garbage chute jamming up. But issues with the public space are dismissed as mere teething problems by the architect, airily played by Jeremy Irons, who lives on the building’s penthouse floor with its garden roof on which his wife parades around like some postmodern Marie Antoinette, on a horse.

Top of the world … a scene from Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise. Photograph: LMK

Among the plebeians, Wilder (Luke Evans) makes trouble and yet is obscurely excited by the violent disorder he helps to foment, to the dismay of his heavily pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss). Meanwhile, Laing finds this atmosphere of excess might anaesthetise his own guilt at having taken a certain type of fatally spiteful revenge on a medical colleague who was rude to him at one of the building’s noisy and increasingly sinister parties. Decadence, despair and violence are all around, a kind of ongoing erotic catastrophe.



In the 70s, the high-rise building somehow suggested both poverty and impossibly glamorous prosperity: the tower block and the Manhattan skyscraper, prison and escape. From both the film and the book, I got the sense that the building itself, both chi-chi and squalid, is a cross between council buildings like, say, London’s Trellick Tower and the upscale Marina Baie Des Anges in the south of France, whose quasi-colosseum shape always intrigued Ballard. In fact, I thought of Andrea Arnold’s movie Red Road, in which people hang out in the bleak Glasgow building’s highest rooms, sensing a strange sensual surrender in how the wind howls through. (High-Rise also reminded me of Frankie Boyle’s description of the Red Road flats – so depressing they were designed with a diving board on the roof.)

High-Rise is not about a machine for living in, but a machine for going slowly mad in. Maybe a little too slowly. For some, High-Rise could be frustrating, and the specific reference to Margaret Thatcher doesn’t quite work. It is a quasi-period piece, but not irrelevant to a Britain in which buy-to-let apartment blocks are being built with “affordable housing” entrances for the lesser mortals. I loved its gnomic refusal of normal storytelling and the way it approximates the distance of Ballard’s prose. It’s the social-surrealist film of the year.