Film review: Thought-provoking and surreal, High-Rise is a film with ‘cult classic’ written all over it

High-Rise is a fresh take on dystopian sci-fi.

Tom Hiddleston, left, and Luke Evans in High-Rise. Courtesy Front Row Filmed Entertainment

High-Rise

Director: Ben Wheatley

Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Luke Evans, Sienna Miller, Elizabeth Moss

Four stars

Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is a lucky man. He is a successful surgeon and just moved into his dream apartment in a state-of-the-art luxury tower block.

There’s an unusually hedonistic atmosphere to the place, and his life soon becomes a debauched cycle of all-night parties and meaningless intimacy.

Beneath the surface, however, lies a constant, simmering tension. The floors of the tower are strictly segregated, with those who clean the floors and work in the supermarket confined to the lower levels. The class division reaches all the way up to the penthouse, which is occupied by architect Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), the literal and metaphorical brains behind the building.

As the tower suffers some “teething problems”, the social order begins to break down until the building splits into violent tribes and then erupts into full-scale class warfare.

This is not an “easy” film. It opens with a shot of Laing in his burnt-out apartment tucking into the barbecued leg of a dog, before a flashback shows us the events that preceded this – and they are no prettier.

Dystopia has become an overused word in cinema, in the wake of The Hunger Games and its copyists, so let's call this something more akin to brutal, primitive, nihilistic anarchy.

The movie's references are worn on its sleeve – William Golding's novel about warring tribes of stranded schoolchildren Lord of the Flies, the breakdown of British society under (and since) Thatcherism, classic 1970s British sci-fi and horror – without being derivative.

It’s often thought-­provoking, sometimes surreal, occasionally baffling, and definitely one to avoid if a couple of hours of ­popcorn-fuelled escapism is your goal for the ­weekend.

Fortunately, Wheatley, alongside his wife and writing partner Amy Jump, is something of a master at making the dark and disturbing into a supremely enjoyable cinema experience.

High-Rise is visually stunning, with more than a nod to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Clint Mansell's haunting soundtrack adds to the psychedelic oddness, while Portishead's spine-tingling cover of ABBA's SOS offers an aural tour de force to the film's climax.

The black humour so memorable in Wheatley’s previous films is very much in evidence here, as the tower’s residents degenerate into a bloodthirsty mob driven only by the desire to possess, kill and reproduce.

Hiddleston and Luke Evans turn in great performances as detached observer Laing and the emotional activist Richard Wilder – though the movie is about the entire cast, or more accurately the whole building, a kind of organic being in itself in which the occupants are parts of a rapidly decaying whole.

In a blockbuster-driven environment, don’t expect this to hang around cinemas too long, so get in quickly and see it – it has cult classic written all over it