High-Rise (2015)

A hallucinatory, blackly-comic satire about social breakdown in a class-stratified block of apartments with its own swimming pool and supermarket, High-Rise is a profoundly immersive visual experience, but lacks textual depth.

Our navigator through the society of the high-rise is Robert Laing, a physiologist (differentiated from a doctor – in the event of a medical emergency, he says he’d just call for an ambulance) who has recently lost his sister and craves a fresh start, leading him to move into the "blank slate" of the high-rise. Tom Hiddleston plays Laing as simultaneously vulnerable and opaque. He goes through the motions of what is considered an acceptable lifestyle for a young middle-class professional with disquieting artificiality – in the film’s own words, he "thrives like an advanced species in the neutral atmosphere". As the situation in the high-rise becomes more and more extreme, Laing begins to undergo a nervous breakdown, bringing forth some of the film’s best visual jokes as he tries to do rowing exercises without a rowing machine by strapping himself to some dumb-bells and pulling on thin air. Hiddleston is perfect in the role, conveying superficial geniality with the vague promise of menace and simmering resentment

In the class context of the film, Laing is situated in between the (for the film's purposes) proletariat at the bottom of the tower and the debauched elites at the top, most absurd of whom is the architect, Royal (Jeremy Irons), who builds for his wife a full-sized garden on the 40^th floor so she can ride her horse, walk around with a shepherd’s crook and "reassert herself on the rung". While a film simulating class conflict from a left-wing perspective might seem to side with the lower classes against the bourgeoisie, High-Rise seems almost equally contemptuous of everyone involved. Its critique is omnidirectional. The main figure among those at the bottom of the high-rise is Wilder (Luke Evans), a documentary filmmaker who is effusive, violent, full of class animosity, and an eventual rapist, stirring up anger in the high-rise so he can film it for his next project. He casually explores infidelity at parties while his long-suffering pregnant wife looks on, and he beats a man mercilessly as two people at the same party debate intervening and conclude it might only make things worse and it’s best to leave it be.

Parties take up perhaps as much as a third of the film, meandering and hallucinatory montages of smoking, drinking. snorting, and debauchery. On the upper floors, the parties occur in Georgian fancy-dress, and Laing is mocked as a dilettante for coming in a suit; on the lower floors they occur in whatever anyone’s wearing at the time, but although there is no pretension to skewer, the working classes do not come off much better, with Wilder’s pregnant wife Helen chain-smoking and drinking heavily as she tells Laing her baby’s overdue. High-Rise is chock-full of caricatured characters – an actress who compulsively asks people if they want her autograph, James Purefoy as a sociopathic and predatory fop, the aforementioned Royal and his absurd wife, and Laing himself. They are almost all unsympathetic, and even tender interactions are ironised as they happen – Laing and Helen lie in bed together in easy intimacy, and she tells him “you really are the best amenity in the building”; Laing talks to single mother Charlotte’s son Toby, who innocently asks him why he doesn’t have a wife, to which he snaps “Why don’t you have a father?”

Without characters or moments which escape unironised and represent genuine human emotion, satires threaten to become untethered and nihilistic. Network had William Holden’s Max Schumacher as the decent man wrapped up in the machinations of an evil system; Alexander Payne’s Election had the emotional gut-punch when Matthew Broderick’s Mr McAllister comes home to find his wife sobbing, his infidelity revealed. The human perspective is lacking in High-Rise, which makes it impossible to emotionally invest.

Failing that, intellectual investment would remain a strength if High-Rise had a coherent satirical statement to make. The title, the central structure, and the omnidirectional mockery of all concerned suggests it is taking aim at a system – the system of capitalism represented by the high-rise. This system is unrestrained by any oversight: it's noted that no police come to the scene when a man commits suicide, and when they do come later, Royal waves them away; it is restrictive – hermetically sealed, containing all amenities considered necessary. Most importantly, it attempts to divide and conquer by first using snobbery, elitism, and envy to divide its population and then redirecting the energies of their conflict towards primal urges of sex (the film is packed with sex scenes) and acquisitive violence (Laing beats a man till his eye pops out to keep a jar of paint).

But the film doesn’t go far enough in developing its thesis – the high-rise’s problems are generally universal (flickering power, bad lifts), and put down to it ‘settling’ rather than constituting a specific campaign to deny resources and intentionally inflict a poor standard of living on the lower floors. There are few procedural details of the tower’s features which could enhance and complicate the metaphor and the critique. A great many lines skewer the absurd detachment and triviality of the rich – Laing is rescued from a murder attempt by Royal’s henchmen when Royal protests that Laing owes him a game of squash – but these are obvious marks and obvious targets. Without humanising, you can only mock a caricature, and it is simple to do so, with diminishing returns.

The film is a visual masterpiece of Brutalist production design, vivid cinematography, and fascinating compositions which emphasise the linear structures of the high-rise and the glossy, reflective surfaces of life in it, to communicate its sterility and superficiality. It shifts from being predominantly bright and vivid in a neon-lit fashion to darker, red-and-brown tones, and the direction moves from smooth, gliding takes to shaky handheld movements as the high-rise breaks down and the structures fall with it. The final movement of the society is announced with the birth of Helen’s child, as the worst of the men are gradually killed: Royal falls to a gunshot from Wilder, and Wilder is then stabbed to death by six women in a re-enactment of the Ides of March, shown to us through a child’s kaleidoscope – the infinite reflections recalling Laing in Royal’s mirror-walled private elevator, which infinitely reflected his blank and confused face. Wilder seems to represent the primal, destructive masculinity that must be purged from the sophisticated high-rise (and from the sophisticated Laing) before society can be rebuilt by the women who are left alive.

But if the message is that the high-rise is a fundamentally male creation – phallic, obviously – and the torch must pass to women in order to redeem it, then the film has hamstrung its ideological point by depicting the key women in the new power structure – Royal’s wife and the narcissistic actress, both named Ann – as absurd and laughable. Nor does the new world, with Laing killing Royal’s dog and eating his roasted leg as he talks about himself in a third-person monologue (“for all its inconveniences, Laing was satisfied with life in the high-rise, ready to move forward and explore life”) appear to be anything but a post-apocalyptic disaster.

High-Rise is fitfully incisive, and if not ideologically coherent or complex, it’s still a reliable source of pitch-black humour, anchored by excellent actors throughout (though perhaps slightly wasted on a gallery of caricatures whose satirical interactions begin to seem increasingly schematic), realised beautifully by superlative production design, and directed with skill and vision 

Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Sensory Overload: The Movie begins with deceptive quietness. The first scenes are a rehash of Batman’s origin story – the mugging in the alley, that scene from Batman Begins where he falls into the cave, the first dream sequence, where Bruce is lifted up by the bats into the air. In a well-publicised attempt to make Man of Steel’s widely-criticised orgy of destruction into a meaningful plot point, BvS has chosen to make Bruce’s presence at ground zero his motivation for killing Superman. The presence of world-ending terraforming engines and evil Kryptonians who Superman was fighting against should surely mitigate against such an uncompromising judgment, but this version of Batman has no nuance; his catchphrase is lifted directly from Dick Cheney – ‘if there’s even a 1% chance that he is our enemy, we have to take it as a certainty’.

Other things this version of Batman does include killing people outright – we see him cause innumerable explosions which engulf henchmen in flames, but when he has the chance to shoot a man to save Superman’s mother, he chooses to shoot the man’s flamethrower tank, because, in Zack Snyder’s words, “Of course, I went to the gas tank, and all of the guys I work with were like, ‘You’ve gotta shoot him in the head’ because they’re all comic book dorks, and I was like, ‘I’m not gonna be the guy that does that!” In the same interview, Snyder explains that Batman killing by ‘proxy’ is acceptable, just not directly - unlike Superman, who's fresh from snapping a neck in Man of Steel.

Showing that he learned his lesson from that film, Zack Snyder overcompensates by having multiple people clarify (in a distracting, obviously-shoehorned way) that every location of BvS’s high-speed battles is unpopulated. The message: no collateral damage. Showing he learned little else, Snyder refuses to portray the most quintessentially heroic character in popular fiction as heroic. Every time Superman saves someone in BvS, he's either dour-faced or grimacing, and shot in slow motion with grim lighting. He hovers above pleading flood survivors but the film refuses to show him helping them. His heroic efforts are cast as the reluctant duty of an unwilling saviour. Taking over from his bafflingly amoral father, Superman’s mother assures him: “You don’t owe this world a thing. You never did”, before Jonathan Kent himself reappears in another runtime-wasting dream sequence to tell his son a story about a time he accidentally diverted flood-water from his own farm into a neighbour’s and all their horses died. The message? Don’t do anything, because it will always have unintended negative consequences. Superman smiles perhaps once or twice in this film, and is kept to a trim 43 lines. The second billing is telling.

This is Batman’s film, which, sadly, doesn’t mean Batman’s character is explored. He remains grimly determined and vicious throughout, and the spotlight given to him is mostly spent on unnecessary dream sequences which bash you over the head with their obvious metaphors. Bruce is lifted up by bats in the cave. Bruce looks at the graves of his parents as they seep blood and a bat-monster leaps out of them. Bruce is a lone bastion of resistance against a fascist warlord Superman; Bruce beats the latter’s goons in a bafflingly-choreographed fight scene where men with guns choose to try and hit him with their guns instead of using them to shoot. Substantial time is also spent on a subplot about hacking into Lex Luthor’s data, which reveals a cache of impeccably-curated sneak-peek trailers, each with their own superhero logo, letting you know that the Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg will be coming to theaters soon. The brazenness of inserting these advertisement-cameos into the narrative is almost funny.

The plot of the film is, at best, shaky, relying on all the right people behaving idiotically – both Batman and Superman make no effort to communicate or resolve their differences, with Superman hypocritically taking exception to Batman being a vigilante just like him, and ordering Batman to stand down, while Batman wittily retorts that he'll make Superman bleed. Jesse Eisenberg’s tech billionaire Lex Luthor is shrill, manic, and extraordinarily annoying as he orchestrates the plot to make them fight by involving the CIA, a Senator, Congress, a survivor of the Metropolis disaster, and the Russian mob, in a confusing whirl of moving parts which Chris Terrio’s abysmal screenplay fails to clarify. The first hour of the film is a plod from one plotline to the next, with scenes following each other simply because they must – no attempt is made to edit the film so it has an engaging pace.

Confusion suffuses the film, from the plot to character motivations (Lex’s reasons for opposing Superman change from fear of absolute power, to a desire to profit from metahumans, to resentment over childhood abuse, to being a puppet of Darkseid) to the action. The fight scenes are afflicted with constant use of shaky-cam, endless cuts without rhyme or reason, ill-lit battlefields draped in smoke which obscure visibility, and a self-indulgent feast of lasers. A chase scene involving the Batmobile and a truck convoy passes without a single establishing shot to show the relative distance between the cars or their locations. The constant spatial delirium of the action scenes renders their special effects bombast pointless. It becomes an abstraction of blue/pink/brown blurs surrounded by bright lasers smashing into architecture, arranged haphazardly by hyperactive editing, framed headache-inducingly by a violently shaking camera.

Snyder is usually defended by citing his visual style. He may be a complete failure on the textual level, but at least he has verve, at least he composes bold images. So, in his own way, he’s an auteur, unlike those studio-controlled hacks directing Marvel films. BvS surely has to be the film which kills this argument. It's constantly dark, with almost every image first being leached of colour and then put on high contrast so your eyes can hurt while you squint to make out the details. The action scenes are nearly-impossible to follow or derive enjoyment from thanks to his directorial ineptitude. When he constructs an image for the purpose of metaphor, it's so laughably obvious as to make his double-profile shot of Clark and Jesus from Man of Steel seem nuanced. He uses slow-motion constantly, on sights as unnecessary as Bruce’s overcoat unfurling as he walks to the Wayne mausoleum or the cannon salute at a funeral. The attempt to wring sophomoric visual dash out of a moment of pathos as unequivocal as a funeral is Snyder’s style in microcosm. He has no sense of what is appropriate, whether in terms of character, dialogue, theme, or image.

This is a film which somehow manages to be chock-full of plot points and fights and talking heads making generalised comments about the ethics of power in a democracy, and also be totally empty. It’s the apotheosis of Zack Snyder’s style-over-substance approach to filmmaking. You’ll come out of it shellshocked, ears ringing and eyes blinking, and realise that you never actually felt a single emotion.

Macbeth (2015)

Justin Kurzel's adaptation of Macbeth is in many ways a boon to anyone who loves the play - superb performances, a period-appropriate setting with beautiful cinematography, meticulous production design, and a distinctive visual style, full of saturated colours and minimalist, spare compositions. The effort put into often-neglected elements of its performance, such as the choreography of the final duel between Macbeth and Macduff, is appreciated. It wouldn't bore newcomers to Shakespeare, and as someone constantly conscious that the majority of people see the plays more as something to be gulped down like medicine than as genuinely compelling entertainment, it's a relief to have adaptations like this.

With that out of the way, it's frequently lacking as an adaptation of the text. The film follows the interpretation that Lady Macbeth had children. This has foundation depending on the reading of 'I have given suck, and know / how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me' - and it can give all sorts of interesting implications to the marital relationship of the central duo, but it doesn't fully deliver on them. It does have a particular performance choice when Macbeth delivers a line to the Lady regarding the 'fruitless crown', where as he does it, he rests his dagger against her stomach - against her womb - not in overt threat (mostly just as a gesturing tool), but with the obvious implication of a latent violence. Real resentment is expressed in that scene from Macbeth to Lady Macbeth regarding her inability to give him a new child so his line isn't fruitless. 

The choice to show Macbeth and Lady Macbeth lighting their dead son's funeral pyre at the beginning adds a poignant double meaning to 'To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate: / come, come, come, come, give me your hand.', which Cotillard plays to the hilt. Sadly, Kurzel's direction chooses to hit the audience over the head with this point -  the double meaning of 'this could refer to her son' is understood the moment she says those lines, but Kurzel cuts from the shot focused straight on Cotillard to a shot which shows that she's literally seeing her dead son in front of her. In a similar case of stripping out any subtlety and dumbing down the material, an actual spot - in the sense of a pimple - is placed on Cotillard's face when she delivers 'Out, damn'd spot', which has the secondary effect of bathos when you remember the spot is supposed to be one of blood, on her hand. Yet not once does Cotillard look at her hand or try to rub it out during the speech.

This omission exemplifies a trend of naturalistic acting throughout the film, which I don't oppose on principle, but which hobbles the effectiveness of the speeches in this specific instance. Fassbender and Cotillard forgo gestures or movement, preferring to deliver their monologues and soliloquies by standing in one place and remaining fixed in a single attitude. Theatre often requires theatricality, and their choices result in frequently-inert delivery. They telegraph the emotions well, but they don't command the stage. 

The film focuses on Lady Macbeth more so than Macbeth, going so far as to include a scene (totally diverging from the play) where Macbeth has Lady Macduff and her children brought back to Dunsinane, tied to stakes, and burned alive, while an audience of his household retainers and Lady Macbeth watch on, disgusted, and Macbeth raves.  The purpose of the scene is to drive a further wedge between the two and explain the future disloyalty of Macbeth's people, but it remains an egregiously bad choice, being both obvious in its declaration of villainy (obviousness dogging Kurzel's choices throughout the film) and inappropriately public. Macbeth is characterised by the fact that all his crimes are done in the cover of night - the scene exemplifies the film's heavy-handed and unsubtle approach to establishing implications. When Fleance escapes the killers, he sees one of the witches as he runs, as if to tell the audience that the prophecy is working as intended - we know. 

The chopping-up of the play, the addition and subtraction of scenes which results in a cumulative simplification and dumbing-down of the text, also means that a lot of speeches lose their power, both by being removed from their proper context and from being cut altogether. Others, which remain, are underplayed disappointingly. 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow', is one of the greatest speeches of all time, and deserves a more stirring, heartbroken, hopeless rendition than the muted one Fassbender offers. 

The film presents the military aspect of Macbeth's identity front and center, featuring him coaxing a poor young boy into battle at the beginning, who is killed in the fight and later reappears as a ghost. It shows him caring for his fallen men and lighting their pyres after preparing their bodies for cremation. There's a emotional aspect to those gestures which could easily be tied into a larger angle regarding how the wanton loss of life in war is connected to the monarchy, and whether Macbeth's usurpation of the throne through the assassination of a single man can be considered morally worse than Duncan spending many lives to defend his throne when the kingdom would remain much the same under a different ruler. But this is never developed. 

Every time the film gains something, it loses something. The 'Had I but died an hour before this chance, / I had lived a blessed time' speech is delivered by Fassbender with sneering malevolence, to Malcolm alone. This explains ably why Malcolm might run off and inadvertently shoulder the blame for Duncan's assassination - because Macbeth made him fear for his life. But by making the choice to have Macbeth grin with malice, the film loses Macbeth's vulnerability and deep regret for having killed Duncan. Fassbender's Macbeth generally lacks the vulnerability which is so integral to his complexity. He's muscular, effusive, vigorous, and when he begins to crack, he cracks with deranged energy, not with inward terror. Even his sadness and despair is stolid.

While it's a good film in many ways and a good point of entry to Shakespeare, with excellent production values, as an adaptation of the text, Macbeth is frustratingly mediocre. 

The Boy and the Beast (2015)

Ren is a nine-year-old runaway living homeless in Tokyo, adjacent to an unseen world -  the world of beasts, undergoing a leadership change as its Grandmaster steps down and two rivals vie to succeed him. Iouzen, the favourite, is a boar - he's widely-respected with many disciples; Kumatetsu, the underdog, is a grumpy-ill-mannered bear, and he doesn't even have one disciple. On a jaunt in Tokyo, grumbling about how nobody will follow him, Kumatetsu runs into Ren, and offers to take him in, even though he's a human. Ren accepts.

For the first half of the film, Ren remains nine years old - he's self-motivated, scrappy, and engaging. His dynamic with Kumatetsu changes from mutual suspicion to tentative respect - he's incensed when Kumatetsu takes a beating from Iouzen and is the only one who cheers for the underdog. Ren takes over all the household chores, earns his keep, and starts training himself to fight. For his part, Kumatetsu progresses from uncomprehending and gruff dismissal to a delighted appreciation of Ren's willingness to learn. Kumatetsu is essentially childish, which makes his baffled joy when Ren imitates his movements to learn footwork especially gratifying. They're an odd pair of father and son, and the film is at its best when it shows their developing rapport.

The film's clearly about Ren's struggle to reconcile his dual identity of human and beast, but it remains undeveloped beyond the superficial implications of loneliness. An ill-judged time-skip montage in the middle section of the movie takes Ren from nine years old to seventeen years old in five minutes, ending the joy of watching his childhood and his growth. Soon after, he finds a secret way out of the world of beasts and for the next hour, he's busy trying to get back into the world. He befriends a girl at the library who helps him educate himself - he's missed 8 years of school - so he can become a functioning adult. He tracks down his repentant father and reconnects with him. From his character's perspective, these are all good choices which represent development, but the total lack of dramatic tension makes the film sag. The stakes have to be artificially raised by Ren suddenly throwing a tantrum at his father and seeing a black hole of darkness inside himself in a shop mirror, and spiraling into miserable brooding till his friend - Kaede - smacks him and snaps him out of it. 

The problem is, the previous section of the film has steered it towards an offbeat ending, thanks to the deliberate pacing and the lack of clearly-established chronological stakes - it's never clear exactly when Kumatetsu will have to duel Iouzen. So, the sudden revelation of the darkness inside Ren, followed by the same darkness becoming visible in Iouzen's adopted human son Ichirouhiko, both feel like attempts to inject a sense of climax into a meandering narrative. Granted, this has been foreshadowed by the claim early in the movie that humans are dangerous to the beast world because they contain darkness, and by the hints that Ichirouhiko is a human, but the eight-year gap in the middle of the film creates a dislocation and any gradual development of Ichirouhiko's (and Ren's) isolation and resentment is lost. They go from well-adjusted to almost insane in what feels like minutes. Plus, there's no thematic weight to this 'darkness', because we're never told why only humans manifest it and beasts don't. The idea seems to be that it comes out of loneliness or a sense of not belonging, but surely beasts - who think and feel just like we do - would experience that. There's little to connect the vaguely-hinted darkness with Ichirouhiko's full-fledged manifestation of a telekinetic whale-monster in the climax, which comes off as more ridiculous than dramatically earned. 

Like every Mamoru Hosoda film, Beast is a visual delight - colourful, finely-drawn, and fluidly animated. His directorial experiments in the lateral tracking shot (explored here, from his previous work, Wolf Children) and the lovely and engaging, soundtrack adding sorely-needed personality to what is often a staidly conventional film. But they can't rescue it from feeling like two movies in one - a joyful children's movie welded to a misconceived teen drama. In the end, the most engaging part of the film is the first half, despite its lack of ambition. Beast is too simple a film to convincingly explore the perspective of a young adult Ren. It works best when it comes from the perspective of a child filled with wonder, exploring its beautiful world.