High-Rise

A delusional adventure in alcoholism, substance abuse, violence and sexual undertones. Wait that makes this sound interesting. How’s this instead? A building of people go mental for two hours in something resembling a psychological commentary. Starring Simon Peggs stunt double.

If pressed to describe this film in one word it would be ‘intriguing’. If pressed to describe it in two, then I would choose ‘depressingly intriguing’. Don’t confuse intrigue with good though. War, famine and plague are all intriguing but I would be hard pressed to call them good, unless of course they were unleashed upon the creators of this movie.

Now it's just some film I wish I didn't watch.

In the realms of ‘Being John Malkovich’ or ‘A Clockwork Orange’ comes High-Rise, as what I can only assume is some sort of psychological commentary on modern life, or work, or patriarchy, or something. Incredibly heavy on symbolism and foreshadowing, it does it’s best to promote interest through ambiguity. An hour into this ambiguous journey, however, and you might start feeling a yawn in the depths and a heaviness in the eyelids despite the numerous on screen murders and sex scenes. At one point they eat a horse and I barely noticed. In fact the major reason I made it to the end was the graphically upsetting imagery and boyish hope that it might all come to some amazing point. It may have as well, but two hours in I had given up caring and was just praying for the ‘and then he woke up’ ending.

And I bet you didn't believe me.

Going in to this film I had no idea what it was about. I knew it was based on a book by J.G.Ballard that I had intended to read, and I had read a sentence summary along the lines of ‘A building of people cope with an ever increasing amount of anarchy’. I half expected a zombie film based in a hotel building if I’m honest, and to be doubly honest I was a bit disappointed when it wasn’t. It is, instead, a story of an uprising against hierarchy, loosely following one man through the process. Tenants at points seem to be of hive-mind and know everything that happens within the walls, and at other times seem completely imperceptible to the daily coming and goings. The main characters motives are never really clear, and as one should expect from an arty film it ends with a child sitting on a throne of electronic devices, smoking a pipe and listening to a radio detailing the logistics of capitalism. Of course you don’t get it. It’s art.

In terms of filmic devices it is sound. Music plays a key role at points, the camera angles and scope do well to promote emotion within scenes, and the actors all do a pretty good job. Even the child actors pull this one off, though I suspect it’s mainly because their roles entailed screaming, yelling, throwing things and running about. Basically being a child 101.

High-Rise’s main entertaining factor is that it is two parts confusing and one part graphic. Combining these, however, doesn’t create the tasty, entertaining tale I had hoped for. Instead it is long, tedious and disappointing, though I’m sure all the arty types out there would disagree with me stating that I ‘just don’t get it’. They would be right of course, I don’t get it. I don’t want to get it. The only place I want to get it is away from me. I give it 3/10 dead dogs. Why dead dogs? To be intriguing. Depressingly so.