The Films of Ben Wheatley

Down Terrace

Kill List & Sightseers

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A Field in England

High-Rise (Mary 29/16)

One of the worst, most annoying films ever made, High-Rise follows Tom Hiddleston's Robert Laing, a circa 1970s doctor, as he moves into an exclusive new apartment building and is subsequently drawn into anarchy as the various inhabitants begin to turn on one another. High-Rise, based on J.G. Ballard's disaster of a novel, announces its less-than-compelling intentions virtually from its opening frames, as director Ben Wheatley, working from a script by Amy Jump, kicks the proceedings off with a nonsensical first act that sets a tone of abject incompetence and infuriating surreality. It's clear, too, that High-Rise's overall atmosphere of incompetence is compounded and perpetuated by Wheatley's almost shocking lack of original ideas, as the movie essentially comes off as a riff on other, better endeavors from scene to scene. (Kubrick is clearly a huge influence on Wheatley and it often feels as though he's told his collaborators to essentially copy the look and feel of A Clockwork Orange.) There's virtually nothing within High-Rise that makes even an ounce of sense within any given scene, as Wheatley abandons any pretense of logic or narrative flow right from the get-go in favor of a stylish (yet hopelessly empty) satire of class resentment. And as intolerable as the movie's first half may be, High-Rise's progressively baffling vibe - eg why does Laing not just leave the building? - ensures it takes an almost Herculean willpower to remain seated right through to the bitter, anticlimactic end. It's ultimately difficult to easily recall a more misguided and interminable trainwreck of a movie than High-Rise, with the movie's complete failure impossible to deny and its total lack of positive attributes impressive in its audacity (ie this is the kind of film that will be studied in the years and decades to come of what not to do).

no stars out of