Screenwriter Amy Jump (Wheatley's wife) doesn't keep any secrets about where High-Rise is going. She opens with Laing blood-stained and rumpled, coolly eating that dog on his balcony, amid piles of filth and refuse. Then she leaps backward to the point he'd just mentioned, three months ago, when Laing moved into his new apartment in a hunched, 40-story tower of raw concrete. Laing openly longs for the order and sterility of the high-rise: it gives him the sense of control and belonging that he craves. It's poreless, sleek, and impervious, all the things he aspires to be himself.

His neighbors are all initially cordial and equally sleek, but below the surface, they're all rapidly disintegrating. Charlotte (Sienna Miller) is a playful, worldly resident whose balcony overlooks his. The aptly named Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) wants to be her lover, but she keeps turning him away. He's estranged from his heavily pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss), who sees Laing as a kind ally. But then Laing runs into the building's architect, Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons, who 25 years ago also might have made a perfect Laing), who wistfully explains that the building is meant to be "a crucible for change." He just has no idea how to enact that change, or even necessarily what form he wants it to take. He seems to have egalitarian ideas, but his immense penthouse garden — where decadent, exclusive parties take place — suggests otherwise. As his debauched, resentful wife Ann (Keeley Hawes) points out, the high rise has already developed a strict hierarchy based on how close to the top a given resident lives. Laing lives on the 25th floor, and hobnobbing with the greats in the penthouse is the act of a pathetic social climber. When the building's power starts to fail, and the cliques on various floors ossify into gangs, open warfare abruptly breaks out, and Laing has to choose sides.

Laing wants to be as sleek and solid as his home, but they're both equally corrupt

Much like the previous Ballard film adaptation Crash (the 1996 David Cronenberg movie about erotic car accidents, not the regrettable 2004 Oscar-winner), High-Rise is a chilly, alienating movie, about people whose choices make more sense as metaphor than as actual human behavior. In the broad sense, High-Rise follows the logic of social criticism: the people up top oppress those down below, so the lower classes rise up and create mayhem. But the only "lower classes" in the building are the artificially created ones: it's an expensive, prestigious new tower, and even the lower floors are filled with middle-class workers with shiny new cars and polished new suits. Grumbles over power outages turn to wholesale slaughter surprisingly quickly, and wreckage builds up almost magically overnight. Wheatley suffuses the film with dread and grotesque violence, particularly against women. If High-Rise weren't so straight-faced and ruthless, it would look like a Terry Gilliam movie, with a laughable manic anarchy lurking on the backside of every calm conversation.

And the character specifics are particularly strange. Royal is particularly inconsistent, veering from hero to villain to absent god from sequence to sequence. The restless, lonely Laing seems to find what he wants in a deeply fulfilling sexual encounter, but the moment goes unremarked upon by either character, and when Laing's lover is endangered later, he doesn't appreciably react. Meanwhile, a third resident starts systematically raping and beating a fourth; Royal and his aristocrats react by grumbling that the rapist is assaulting a woman above his level, and suggest forcing Laing to lobotomize him. No one, not even the victim, thinks to call the police, or seek out help. There's a touch of Luis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel in the way everyone in the building seems to be stuck there, isolated from the outside by mutual consent, for no reason anyone cares to address.