J. G. Ballard is not an author I’m familiar with, other than for the film versions of his novels Empire of the Sun and Crash. I liked the former, and the latter had some interesting ideas but suffered from a lack of coherence.
Now we have a film of another one of his most famous works, High Rise, first published in 1975. Tom Hiddlestone plays a doctor, Robert Laing, who has just moved into a new high-rise building in London. His sister died recently and he claims he is looking for anonymity, but he soon starts interacting with the other residents. It is supposedly a state of the art building but as things start to fail, such as regular power cuts, all order within the building breaks down.
As chaos begins to reign, you can’t take anything in High Rise at face value. You could have many interpretations of what is going on. It could be all in Laing’s mind during his nervous breakdown, or some sort of hell overseen by the architect (Jeremy Irons). The more obvious interpretation is the building is symbolic of society, with the privileged on the upper floors and the poor struggling on the lower floors. The problem with the film is once that meaning is established, you are left with a series of increasingly violent or disgusting set pieces. Some of those are very good, such as one sound-tracked by a Beth Gibbons cover version of the Abba song S.O.S. but in the end, I felt that the point was being hammered home too much, as exemplified by the final scene in the film.
All the performances are fine, with Luke Evans and Elisabeth Moss standing out, and Clint Mansell provides his usual terrific score.
So, I was left feeling much the same way as I did Crash 20 years ago. Patchy, too strident, and overdone.
Rating: 5 out of 10