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H I G H R I S E D I R E C TO R B E N S O C I E TA L C O L L A P S E I S I cer’s not malignant, it’s just another force. The way he talked about life and death and the randomness of health and ill health - I found that fascinating”.

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peaking after the premiere of his adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel, High Rise director and star, Tom Hiddleston, discuss imminence of large-scale civil disorder, levels of nudity and eating dogs The collapse of society is coming soon to a civilisation near you, according to Ben Wheatley. The director, whose adaptation of High Rise, JG Ballard’s 1975 novel about a tower block falling into anarchy, premiered at the Toronto film festival last night, said we’re attracted to the idea of fictional dystopias because it’s a playful way of dealing with death.

“The collapse of society isn’t really about society, it’s about us,” he said. “It’s about our own deaths and the fear of that and the fear of losing control”.

“The zombie film is a civil war movie isn’t it?

Society’s turned against me and I’ve got to fight my way out. They’re zombies because it’s distasteful to shoot your neighbours.”

High Rise stars Tom Hiddleston as Dr Robert Laing, a pathologist who starts to neglect his job in order to spend more and more time fighting for his place amongst the crumbling social strata of the tower block. “[Ballard] was incredibly prescient about our obsession with technology and how we outsource our needs to machines,” he said. “The building, for him, was a manifestation of that”.

Wheatley said he wanted to cast Hiddleston so much that he and his wife - High Rise scriptwriter Amy Jump - keep a cutout of the actor’s head on their whiteboard while they developed the film. Hiddleston’s co-star, Luke Evans, said he was thankful that his character, a television cameraman called Robert Wilder who - in the book - goes feral and runs naked around the tower, got to keep his clothes on.

“He predicted all of the things that are now part of our world. He predicted social media.

He predicted YouTube and the industrialisation of the moving image. He said that the way we related to technology would create shifts in our psychological patterns”.

Hiddleston spent time with an eminent UK pathologist in preparation for shooting the film. He said that he had brought some of the doctor’s pragmatic world view into playing Laing.

“His take on it was that we give disease an almost human motivation, which he believes it doesn’t have,” he said. “So we talk about malignant cancer and he was saying that can-

“Wilder doesn’t dangle his appendage out as much as he does in the book. I’m glad your wife chose to keep that out,” he said to Wheatley.

High Rise, which also stars Elisabeth Moss and Sienna Miller, has had a long journey to the screen, with producer Jeremy Thomas, a friend of Ballard’s, waiting almost 40 years for the rights to the book to become available.

Wheatley described the novel as “a rite of passage” for teenagers.

In the film and the opening and closing chapters of Ballard’s book, Laing describes eating an Alsatian. Hiddleston was asked which breed of dog he thought would be the tastiest.

“To my knowledge I don’t think I’ve ever

N W H E AT L E Y : I MM I NE N T.

“THE WAY HE TALKED ABOUT LIFE AND DEATH AND THE RANDOMNESS OF HEALTH AND ILL HEALTH - I FOUND THAT FASCINATING”.

THE END IS NIGH

High-Rise (Ben Wheatley, UK)

By Tom Charity

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

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hat, friends, is an opening sentence: J.G. Ballard at his best. And damn if Ben Wheatley doesn’t find just the right visual syntax to convey that tone of sanguine urbanity, spiced with a soupcon of barbarism. Man bites dog!

It is time for High-Rise at last. Published in 1975 (the same year, incidentally, that David Cronenberg infected a condo with sexual slugs in Shivers), the novel is a kind of adult Lord of the Flies, with a luxury tower block - all mod cons - replacing William Golding’s shipwreck island, and instead of the kids there’s a cross-section of mid-’70s swingers, lefties, and jetsetters ditching the social niceties and tearing each other to shreds when left to their own devices.

Producer Jeremy Thomas initially commissioned Paul Mayersberg to adapt Ballard’s novel for Nic Roeg (Roeg did Bad Timing [1980] instead, and later collaborated with Thomas and Mayersberg on Eureka [1983]). In the ‘90s, Cronenberg and Thomas did Crash (1996) instead, and more recently Thomas tried to get High-Rise made with a script by Richard Stanley and Canadian director Vincenzo Natali. But in the end it’s fallen to Amy Jump and Ben Wheatley to erect this gleefully perverse and ferociously pissed-off edifice, some 40 years after Ballard hit on his perfect allegory for an increasingly technologically introverted, narcissistic, and economically polarized society.

If that seemed like a perverse dystopian fantasy in Edward Heath’s Conservative Britain, it looks downright prophetic in retrospect - and not only because, as I write, the papers are full of scandalous stories about the late Mr. Heath and a pedophile ring operating at the very top of the British establishment.

Seizing on the delightfully oxymoronic possibilities of an apocalyptic period film, Wheatley has retained the ‘70s period trappings; concrete modernism on the outside vying with patterned wallpaper and faulty electricity (from January to March 1974, Heath’s government implemented the “Three-Day Week,” restricting electricity in response to a coal miners’ strike). High-Rise filters memories of ‘70s Britain through rancorous satire: desperately bourgeois wife-swapping

parties, seething class conflict, and mounting piles of rubbish (the garbage men were on strike too). The unofficial theme tune for the era is ABBA’s 1975 hit “SOS,” reprised in various guises here. Yet the movie feels of our time too, immediate, or perhaps imminent, a flash-forward (not backwards) to a present tense we already know in our bones: savage, chaotic, cannibalistic, and doomed. As Ballard puts it, it exists in “a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.”

This isn’t what mild-mannered Laing (Tom Hiddleston) anticipates when he opts for the self-imposed isolation of a large but empty and anonymous apartment on the 25th floor.

It’s an address that places him firmly in the middle class of a strictly stratified society, though with his bachelor-boy good looks and career as a brain pathologist he may justly fancy himself to be upwardly mobile.

Still, he’s torn between his attraction to sexy single mother Charlotte (Sienna Miller), who occupies a suite close to the building’s architect, Royal (Jeremy Irons), and his sympathies for lowly documentary filmmaker Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) and Wilder’s wife, Helen (Elisabeth Moss). Like most families, the Wilders live down at the base of the building, on the second floor. (Turn the Snowpiercer train from a horizontal to a vertical axis, and this is what it looks like.)

Royal, of course, lords it over everyone in a vast penthouse which protrudes out from the building like an upturned L, and which opens up onto a folly of a rooftop garden worthy of Versailles. There is even a horse.

The film may be a folly itself: Fury Road without a chase, without a road, even. The narrative turns on the fallout when Wilder leads a group of kids to crash a private pool party. Ballard doesn’t go in for cause and effect. Events emanate from the gestalt. Shit happens. There is a death. “Nothing that can’t be swept under the rug,” is the order of the day, but everywhere you look the high life in this high-tech high-rise is falling apart. The lifts don’t work. The lights are out. The shelves in the grocery store on the ground floor are empty. Relationships break down. Inhibitions are shed. The party is getting out of hand.

The impotent Royal keeps insisting his building is an experiment, and “still settling.”

He’s deluded. The tower - and the movie implodes in an orgy of destruction.

Wheatley’s first three features are all tight, low-budget black comedies, sharp social satires set in a kill-or-be-killed lower-middleclass England. His fourth, A Field in England

SEIZING ON THE DELIGHTFULLY OXYMORONIC POSSIBILITIES OF AN APOCALYPTIC PERIOD FILM, WHEATLEY HAS RETAINED THE ‘70S PERIOD TRAPPINGS;

(2013), is an hallucinatory, Beckettian vision of Civil War deserters caught in their own never-ending circle of hell. High-Rise has the same mordant, dogeat-dog worldview as the earlier films but has more in common with the loose, irrational, psychic-sensorial assault course he tapped in A Field in England. But that was made in 12 days on a shoestring. This is Wheatley unleashed, with, one imagines, a budget that must have been more than equal to his four previous films’ combined.

DP Laurie Rose - like Jump, a Wheatley regular - does extraordinary work here. After the monochromatic A Field in England, High-Rise is saturated in hot reds, blues, yellows, and greens; a heady kaleidoscopic palette that’s almost as trippy. Although it’s (almost all) set in a single building, this is the first Wheatley movie where he allows himself to flex. It’s a very geometric film: a film not only of surface pleasures, but of precipitous verticals, acute angles, movement in space and time; the exhilaration of exhibitionism‚ĶAn atrocity exhibitionism, naturally, just as Ballard would have wanted.

In one scene - off site - we watch Laing ply his trade, demonstrating what a human head looks like if you peel away the facial skin.

It’s a reminder of Ballard’s days as a student of anatomy, but also a remonstration to get over our natural repugnance and observe.

Audiences would do well to take note.

High-Rise is not what you would call an easy watch. But as a scathing, Swiftian indictment of free-market capitalism, a community so cocooned that “people usually don’t care what happens two floors above or below them,” and society in free-fall, this tour de force belongs on a pedestal alongside Lindsay Anderson’s maligned Britannia Hospital (1982) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). But it’s also more than that: a dispassionate study of the human animal in all its perversity and pride, presiding over the rubble as all around him the future goes up in smoke.