High-Rise

FILMS OF THE MONTH High-Rise United Kingdom/Belgium 2015 Director: Ben Wheatley Certificate 15 118m 54s Reviewed by Henry K. Miller Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist In Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, as in his previous film A Field in England (2013), also written by Amy Jump, the country is on the edge of something. In the earlier film it was the execution of Charles I and the establishment of a Puritan republic; in this one it’s Margaret Thatcher’s first general election victory 330 years later. Jump has adapted J.G. Ballard’s source novel, set in the Britain of the 1960s or 1970s but largely free of specific period markers, into a film redolent of the book’s year of publication, 1975, also the year that Thatcher became Tory leader. Cars, costumes, decor and facial hair are all echt mid-1970s. Whereas the high-rise of the book – more or less a stand-in for the Barbican, populated by “an apparently homogeneous collection of high-income professional people” – is riven by violent, quasisocial conflicts that seem to have their origin in the building’s design, in the film the revolt of the airline pilots of the lower floors against the tax consultants of the middle is tantamount to actual class war. The rolling power cuts and overflowing rubbish bins bring to mind the Three-Day Week and the Winter of Discontent, and one of the orgies characterising the building’s descent into social chaos evokes Bianca Jagger’s fabled entrance into Studio 54 on a white horse. Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), a lower-storey television documentary maker alienated by the building’s automation of daily life, becomes an emblem of virtually proletarian authenticity, while sharp-suited, clean-shaven physiologist Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is a prototypical yuppie of the next decade, newly installed in a mid-level apartment and perfectly attuned to the regime of anomie and anonymity. In so far as the film has a plot beyond the unravelling of the high-rise’s social fabric, it is centred on Wilder and Laing’s relationship with the building’s architect and owner Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons). A frustrated modernist who has had to build an English country garden on the roof to please his upper-class wife Ann (Keeley Hawes), he laments that the high-rise, conceived along egalitarian brutalist lines as a “crucible for change”, has become home to “the vanguard of the well-to-do”. For the somewhat inarticulate Wilder, denied access to the upper floors, the whole edifice must be torn down; for Laing, whose social status is more ambiguous, Royal’s original conception was misguided, since it allowed the traditional class divisions to reassert themselves, but not irredeemable. In Laing’s view, and eventually in Royal’s, the high-rise’s inhabitants’ seeming descent into barbarism is actually a first step towards freedom, fulfilling their unconscious expectations. At the end, Royal wonders whether he may unwittingly have brought into being a “paradigm for future developments”; and his murder by Wilder confirms his hypothesis by enabling Laing to occupy his new self to the full. Laing’s name is almost certainly meant to echo that of the radical (or anti-) psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who wrote in 1967’s The Politics of Experience that “humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities”, that “our collusive madness is what we call sanity” and that the “fundamental human 64 | Sight&Sound | April 2016 Divided self: Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) in the elevator of his high-rise residence significance of architecture” lay in the kinds of experience it offered or curtailed – although unlike Robert, R.D. thought that conditions in the “modern megalopolis” were necessarily constricting. In an early scene, Robert is shown happily dissecting a human brain for the benefit of his students, having peeled back the face from the skull. It’s a striking image, which takes on additional significance when it reappears in a Roegian montage as the high-rise enters another stage of “collusive madness” – and it may well have been inspired by the real Laing, who wrote in The Politics of Experience of the old belief that “the ‘seat’ of the soul was somewhere in the brain. Since brains began to be opened up frequently, no one has seen ‘the soul’.” Hiddleston’s character, deftly suggesting without parading the damage that has been done beneath the dapper exterior, does not give the impression that he still believes there is anything to see. In a related piece of effective symbolism – he describes the building as an “unconscious design of some sort of psychiatric event” – he eventually gives up trying to paint the exposed concrete ducts in his apartment Observation tower: at key moments, the action is shown through the eyes of a child, Toby (Louis Suc) Tom Hiddleston’s Dr Robert Laing is a prototypical yuppie, perfectly attuned to the regime of anomie and anonymity and allows the building’s logic to take over. At some significant points the action is shown through the eyes of a child, Toby (Louis Suc), illegitimate son of Royal and Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller), the latter of whom becomes Laing’s occasional lover. Children are a source of special resentment for the upper-storey residents, in both book and film, and the adoption of Toby’s point of view – also perhaps the view of child-ofthe-1970s Wheatley – is a telling departure that could be interpreted as a check on Ballard’s ironic but still discernibly libertarian perspective on the decadence he depicts. A slight note of accusation, unsounded in Ballard, may be heard when Toby discovers his mother and Laing in flagrante delicto – in the novel they wait till he’s asleep. In this way perhaps, and certainly in others, the partial adoption of Toby’s viewpoint is central to Jump and Wheatley’s decision to ground High-Rise in history. During the film’s first party, Toby is seen in his bedroom putting together a radio kit; in the final shot he is listening to a recording of Thatcher arguing in a Commons debate of November 1976 that “there is only one economic system in the world, and that is capitalism”, the important difference being between state capitalism and private capitalism. This seems to be intended to provide a clinching explanation for the high-rise’s transformation, and to make explicit the privatised nature of the new ‘paradigm’. But a dissident Credits and Synopsis Produced by Jeremy Thomas Written by Amy Jump Based on the novel by J.G. Ballard Director of Photography Laurie Rose Edited by Amy Jump Ben Wheatley Production Designer Mark Tildesley Music Composed by Clint Mansell Sound Designer Martin Pavey Costume Designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux ©RPC High-Rise Limited, The British Film Institute, Channel Four Television Corporation Production Companies Jeremy Thomas, HanWay Films, Film4 and BFI present in association with Northern Ireland Screen, Ingenious Media, Scope Pictures and S Films a Recorded Picture Company production A film by Ben Wheatley Made with the partial assistance of the European Regional Development Fund through Northern Ireland Screen Produced by Backwell Productions Limited Developed with the support of Film4 With support from the Tax Shelter of the Belgian Federal Government via Scope Invest Made with the support of the BFI’s Film Fund London, 1975. Physiology lecturer Robert Laing moves into an apartment halfway up an exclusive new high-rise development that seems to be isolated from the rest of the world. Soon he becomes sexually involved with nearneighbour Charlotte Melville, and is taken up socially by the building’s penthouse-dwelling architect Anthony Royal, father of Charlotte’s son Toby; however, he is shunned by the other residents of the upper floors. The building’s physical and social infrastructure starts to break down and life degenerates into a permanent orgy. Animosities between the different levels of the building lead to violence. In particular, denizens of the upper levels resent the children of the lower-level residents, and the building goes into terminal decline after a children’s party in a swimming pool gets out of hand. Executive Producers Peter Watson Thorsten Schumacher Lizzie Francke Sam Lavender Anna Higgs Gabriella Martinelli Christopher Simon Geneviève Lemal Cast Tom Hiddleston Dr Robert Laing Jeremy Irons Anthony Royal Sienna Miller Charlotte Melville Luke Evans Richard Wilder Elisabeth Moss Helen Wilder James Purefoy Pangbourne Keeley Hawes Ann Peter Ferdinando Cosgrove Sienna Guillory Jane Reece Shearsmith Steele Enzo Cilenti Talbot Augustus Prew Munrow Dan Skinner Simmons Stacy Martin Fay Tony Way Robert the caretaker Leila Mimmack Laura Bill Paterson Mercer Louis Suc Toby In Colour [2.35:1] Distributor Studiocanal Limited Young father Richard Wilder, a television documentary maker, blaming Royal for the high-rise’s malign atmosphere and worsening condition, ascends the building and rapes Charlotte, before being caught by Royal’s henchmen. Laing analyses him but refuses to lobotomise him, on the grounds that his rebellion against the building is rational. Over dinner with Laing, Royal, initially disappointed that his egalitarian designs for the high-rise have been betrayed by its residents, arrives at the view that he may well have liberated them after all. Later, Wilder goes up to the top floor and kills Royal, and is in turn killed by Royal’s wife Ann and her friends. Laing, content, looks forward to the neighbouring high-rises submitting to the same irrational impulses that have consumed his. April 2016 | Sight&Sound | 65 FILMS OF THE MONTH reading is that, from Toby’s youthful standpoint, Thatcher holds out the promise of change. However, Toby’s point of view doesn’t dominate the film, which is too often larky in tone rather than menacing or mysterious. Perhaps it is inevitable that, in the age of sexting, some of what Ballard imagined now seems like old-world courtesy, but much of High-Rise resembles a grubby, all-too-human swingers’ party more than the birth of a new civilisation fit for “an advanced species of machine” as Ballard puts it in the novel. Moreover, the tonal uncertainty leads to a disastrous lapse of judgement, when Charlotte’s rape by Wilder is given a soundtrack of Portishead slowly and mournfully travestying Abba’s ‘SOS’. All in all, the most interesting departures from Ballard are made too fitfully, and the least welcome too boldly. The thick period fidelity is sometimes a distraction; if we are meant to believe that Hiddleston’s character is following a “logic more powerful than reason”, as he says in voiceover at the end, then the 1970s setdressing and entry-level political gloss are unnecessary. Summing up his difference from his contemporaries in an interview with Will Self, Ballard once said: “What I am not interested in is what happened 20 years ago.” Whereas Ballard’s vision of a world irrevocably transformed by technology and pharmacology remains bracing in its deliberate excision of feeling and its disregard for conventional pieties, Wheatley’s reconstruction of the lost England of 40 years ago cossets rather than disturbs its assumed audience, never more so than when dragging on Thatcher at the end as a kind of diabolus ex machina that everyone can be expected to boo.