SFF NOTES: High-Rise (2015, Dir. Ben Wheatley)

I've never read J.G. Ballard. My interest has long been piqued though, especially for his 1975 dystopia 'High Rise'. Friends have championed it. I've shared vicariously in their anticipation of this film adaptation. I've had long discussions on the storeyed societal disintegration that it covers. I saw Snowpiercer.

From this relatively virgin vantage point ("just the tip"), Ben Wheatley's adaptation appears very much at pains to recreate some form of Ballard's anarchy in his take on the material. That means demolishing much of narrative cinema's structure and rummaging through through the ruins.

There is a lot of that in Wheatley's film. I pulled a general gist of what was going on in High Rise based on my exceptions of 'High Rise', but for much of it I was merely fumbling around trying to piece together the barrage of stylish imagery. Wheatley doesn't provide the blueprints.

To break the rules, they need to be established first. Or at least they need to be discernible in the debris. I lost sight of them soon after Tom Hiddleston's Dr. Laing moved into the brutalist monolith (and sunbathed naked on his balcony). Wheatley and his screenwriter Amy Jump provide some rapid-fire intros to Laing's neighbours, including single mother Charlotte (Sienna Miller), who's one floor up (that's important), boorish Wilder (Luke Evans) and brood and pregnant wife, Helen (Elizabeth Moss), who are in the darkened lower levels, and the building penthouse dwelling architect, Royal (Jeremy Irons), who appears to have maybe-possibly engineered the societal microcosm's collapse, but they do little introduce us to their underlying tribes.

This is important since tribes soon go out and out tribal. There is little space to come to grips with the interrelationships, not before things go from off-kilter to pear-shaped across a brief devolution montage (played out over a stunning rendition of ABBA's S.O.S.). Importantly, amongst all this, Wheatley fails to establish why this community elects to live together in their own physical and emotional filth when the front door is wide open.

From a consumption perspective, background becomes critical here. I've had many things further explained to me since coming out of the film (a by-product of taking a dislike to something others are more invested in) and it seems Wheatley and Jump have paid their dues to the book, just not to their own adaptation of it. That is to say, the film is a far richer experience for those who have read Ballard; those who haven't can pretty much go hang.

A stylish companion piece to a book I haven't read. Though I plan to very soon. Then we'll reassess.

★★

Trailer:

High-Rise screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.