High-Rise

“And Mrs. Hillman is refusing to clean unless I pay her what I apparently owe her. Like all poor people, she’s obsessed with money.”

After reading High-Rise over 25 years ago, my first thought was that I wanted to make a film adaptation of the JG Ballard novel. The ideas and images conjured in Ballard’s prose connected with me in such a way that I thought if I ever had the chance to direct or write a feature this was my dream project. As my youthful desire to be a filmmaker was not realized, my wish slowly became that someone would take those indelible images from the page to the screen so that I could see what I imagined as I read the book brought to life. Apparently, producer Jeremy Thomas had that same vision for even longer than I did and almost adapted the novel with Nicolas Roeg decades ago. (Oh, to have seen Ballard’s work through the vision of ‘70s era Roeg!) I had faith that this would be a film worth seeing knowing that Thomas had already shepherded two “un-filmable” books successfully to the screen with David Cronenberg, Naked Lunch and Ballard’s other work of genius Crash.

However, it is inevitable that my thoughts about this film will be colored by having read and loved the novel, and by a sense of anti-climax that is bound to be felt after waiting for something so long. Not only will any film adaptation never be as rich and as individual of an experience as reading a great novel, but can any work of art desired for decades be as good as we want it to be? In this case, for me, the answer is no, but it can be a very good film in and of itself.

Essentially High-Rise is a dystopian microcosm of society' class system set in a high-rise apartment block. The rich live on the top with each class stratified onto the lower levels by where they rank on the ladder of economic success. Director Ben Wheatley wisely chooses to set the film in 1975, the year the novel was written. However, where Ballard's prose style is factual and clinical when describing the shocking and bizarre events, Wheatley goes for a more sardonic and grimly comic tone throughout most of the film. This tone combined with the '70s art direction and costumes is very reminiscent of the way Kubrick chose to present the provocative themes in his equally dystopian Clockwork Orange. (Take a look at both movies' posters side by side and you will see a definite homage in that design as well.) The more recent Snowpiercer also tackled similar themes using a train as a microcosm of society but shaped the material into an action movie.

Tom Hiddleston plays Dr. Robert Laing, the newest arrival to the middle (class) floors of the high-rise. It seems that in the British class system (at least in the '70s) a brain surgeon like Laing was considered middle-class. The higher floors are reserved for the old money aristocracy, with the building's owner and architect (Jeremy Irons) reigning over it all from his top floor estate. The tenuous social structure between the have and have nots begins to unravel shortly after Laing moves in and planned power outages begin to plague the lower-class residents. As more indignities to the lower class floors pile up, it does not take long for the building to descend into complete chaos and eventually literal class warfare between floors. The characters are archetypes, the rebel, the self absorbed aristocrat, etc, with Laing functioning as the everyman caught up in this maelstrom.

Wheatley is not concerned with presenting a cohesive narrative as Ballard does, but rather opts for a more impressionistic and episodic mosaic of scenes and images. What it lacks in narrative drive the film makes up for with memorable images and scenes that convey the same wry and ironic social critiques found in the novel. This is Wheatley's first sizeable budget and he does a fantastic job using his resources. The photgraphy, art direction, costumes, music and acting are all first class and bring Ballard's world to life with great style.

Anyone who has read the book will wonder if Wheatley opens the film with the infamous "dog" scene. The first paragraph of Ballard's book may be the most memorable opening hook I have ever read. Anyone who reads that paragraph has to read the rest of the book to find out how the narrator, Laing, came to be in this situation. Yes, he does and, like the entire film, while it works reasonably well it is not as compelling as the opening of the novel.


This is a thought provoking, stylish and entertaining movie that I look forward to seeing again and finding nuances I missed the first time. Still, do yourself a favor and read the book too. Now, who is going to make Concrete Island, the last of Ballard's three greatest books, into a film? Someone step up, please.