In this dystopian world based on J. G. Ballard's 70s novel, there is no room for realism, but excessively absurd situations take over the story. Here, there are social criticisms and humor for those who are so made, yet far from what suits everyone. The stylistically interesting weighs up the increasingly flawed location, where Jeremy Irons lives at the top of this gated community for those with money, and for those with devilish lot of money. At the top of a horse, on the fifth floor you can shop for a week. It is rumored about a brothel on any of the floors.The skyscraper is so ridiculous that it is impossible to miss it totaly absurd metaphorism , where tenants are cells, and corridors and lifts are its blood circulation. But then the lifts begin to stop and the power disappears periodically. The fruit in the supermarket rots, injustice takes its right. In the midst of all this is the relatively sobra Tom Hiddleston, looking out over the misery that climbs to the top of the money line.Stylistically, this evocation of a world "prone to fits of mania, narcissism and power failure" is spot-on; you can smell the smoke and booze in which everyone is marinated, unhinged adults behaving like unruly children. And when that happens in the movie I'm completely speechless.

JG Ballard's book High Rise is a dystopian masterpiece. It is a small book, less than 200 pages, in which words are used sparingly, and yet manages to paint vivid pictures in your head. It starts with Laing eating a dog, as if that was the natural conclusion of all the events that preceded it, and then takes you on that journey during which all human of all decency is replaced by tribal, basic survival instincts. Ben Wheatley's film is well acted and atmospheric. It is also wonderfully photographed and choreographed, but it ultimately fails to convince the audience about the inevitability of its ending. The pace is wrong. The audience is not shown the importance of the supermarket or the car incidents, and the tenants' behaviour spirals out of control too quickly to be believable. Everything happens in the first 45 minutes, so the remaining hour becomes dull and boring. The book was a dark portrayal of human nature. It convinces us that we are only a few bad incidents away from cold blooded murders and incest. The film is perhaps too faithful to the book to convey the same meaning. To me, it feels as though Wheatley respected the source material so much he failed to change it where necessary to accommodate a different medium. It's similar to what Linklater did with a scanner darkly (which I loved, but not as much as the book... of course), for which he seemed to take full scenes from the book without providing a meaningful synthesis. As someone who read the book and appreciated all the details, I still enjoyed watching the movie, and I am sure I will watch it again, but with a different mindset, considering it as a piece of art. But I can see why people who were not familiar with the material could not appreciate it, and I find it a real shame.

The question intriguing me after watching High Rise wasn't whether it had sufficiently excoriated the class system, as the writer and director seem to have hoped it would, but whether they had understood Ballard's remarkable book at all. Clumsily, almost as an afterthought, the film closes (and it's not a spoiler to say this) with a cheap political shot against 'capitalism'. How very 'Spitting Image'. But Ballard was better and smarter than that. The societal collapse he was describing was just as much a feature of socialist, fascist or communist societies. His Swiftian vision of mankind wasn't restricted to the fashionable political fetishes of the day but to man himself. An even greater irony is that the failure of the High Rise project stems from the fact that it was a planned project at all - which hardly bangs the drum for the sort of social re-engineering, statism and enforced egalitarianism the film makers seem to be suggesting would be preferable. Indeed, the supermarket stocked with nothing but unbranded products called to mind the Soviet Union rather more than Walmart, and it is strange that the director didn't realise this.It's hard to ignore the heavy-handed sixth form political wallpaper but even if one can, the film is still a weak average. Tom Hiddleston is as detached and android like as Ballard's Laing has to be, though one wonders if he has anything else to him as this does appear to be his stock in trade performance, but the rest of the cast hams and camps it up adequately. The orgies, however, get as tiring and passionless for the viewer as they must have been for the participants, and even the choreographed violence lacks any of the dangerously seductive grace of Kubrick's Clockwork Orange - they are simply unpleasant but not even shocking.It is hard to make a film suggesting a dystopian future by setting it in a past which, clearly, those who made it were too young to have experienced. On balance, I wish they had left it someone else.

High-Rise is basically an adult version of Lord of the Flies. Instead of kids abandoned on an island, we have multiple social strata living into a high-technology (for the standards of the '70s) building in which everything works perfectly. Everything, but human nature, which quickly divides the tenants into hierarchies that degenerate into the exploitation of the "poor" and the exaltation of the "rich". I use quotations marks to divide the "rich" and the "poor" because everyone pays the same rent; so, why do some ones live in the superior luxury floors, while other ones barely survive in the filthy basements? That might sounds like an archaic communist fantasy about war of classes and the uprising of the proletariat... and that's very probable, because High-Rise is based on a novel written by J.G. Ballard, the subversive author of other similarly transgressor books such as Crash, The Drowned World and the anthology The Atrocity Exhibition. For better or for worse, the ideals of High-Rise represent the "progressive" British thought from the '70s, and that justifies the wonderful retro atmosphere achieved by cinematographer Laurie Rose and production designer Mark Tildesley. Unfortunately, the message "the humans are animals ready to return to savagery as soon as the electricity is interrupted" has been repeated too many times... and in more interesting ways. The main problem of High-Rise is that its second half gets repetitive until getting a bit tiring. Director Ben Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump rejoice themselves portraying uncountable manifestations of cruelty and barbarism, whether in the shape of grotesque orgies, beatings against the ones aspiring to become revolutionary leaders or the killing of an innocent dog (unfortunately, High-Rise isn't a "pet friendly" film). The message had been left clear since the first half of the movie... but Wheatley and Jump repeat the same ideas over, and over, and over again. High-Rise is a film intended to make us think... but sometimes, it thinks for us, instead of bringing us the tools to draw our own conclusions. On the other hand, it managed to hold my interest, the performances are brilliant, and I also appreciated Clint Mansell's score and the attractive images. Maybe deleting half an hour, High-Rise would have been a potent punch to society's stomach. But with its 120-minute running time, it ends up being as accommodating as the high classes it pretends to denounce.