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