High-Rise (2015) Reviews

• Pretentious rubbish

  nando1301-12016-04-10

  A nice idea gone awfully wrong. The first 20 minutes are actually quite good: the art design is worthy of all the prizes you could award it, and the director builds a growing tension that keeps you interested, although you already know, from the first five minutes, that the likely outcome is that everything will fall apart, since "the building" is clearly a metaphor for "modern" society. However, even predictable plots can be interesting, and initially this seems to be the case. Then, the film loses its grip and very quickly becomes an endless repetition of chaos. By the 30min mark the director has made his point: society sucks and if things continue as they are, we will all descend into primitive behaviour and act like barbarians. Nothing wrong with that message per se, but the film gets stuck on it like a broken record and treats the audience to an endless stream of pointless violence, mindless sex orgies, rapes, more violence, looting, social chaos, still more violence. It's like beating a dead horse and then continuing to beat it until you are beating the skeleton of a dead horse (and you continue beating it). It seems that the writer and director were so in love with the core message that they could not quite get around to developing it and finishing it properly. I saw this at a cinema in London; some people left half-way into it (most seats were empty anyway). I managed to sit through the whole thing, hoping that the movie would redeem itself towards the end; it only got worse. This might be at the top of my "worst films of all time" list. The acting is not bad, the cast is good, and the art design is still deserving awards; but the overall result is just appalling. It would have made a great short film, if they stopped it at 30 minutes. The way it was released, at 119 minutes, it is 90 minutes too long.

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• Too incoherent to convey a clear message

  rubenm2016-07-10

  Is High-Rise an anti-capitalist manifesto, meant to show the evil of inequality? Is it an attack on the British class society? Is it meant to show how modern architecture alienates people from each other? Or is it just a succession of weird scenes, giving the director the opportunity to show off? There's something to say for all of the above, but I'm inclined towards the last. The film really is too incoherent to convey a clear message or idea. The metaphor of a huge high-rise building to symbolize society at large is interesting, but could have been better expressed. As it is now, the metaphor gets mostly lost in an avalanche of weird, decadent or shocking scenes. As a viewer, you keep waiting for the story to become clear, but it never really happens. This is even more annoying because the film is much too long, and already from the start it's clear how it ends because the whole story is one large flash back. The result is zero suspense and maximum weariness.

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• Mish Mash

  steven-drew2016-05-01

  You look at the cast . 10/10 You see the story line 09/10 You see the cinematography 09/10 We settle down , C,mon movie "entertain us" we cry. 1 hour later we just cry. The morning after watching we are still "none the wiser" which is a great shame. Very well made with a cast of most of my favourite Brit actors but what the hell is it all about ???? I still haven't got a clue. Pretentious , Brit film Noir? my biggest regret is we wasted a Saturday night watching it. My wife kept saying , "turn it off if you don't like it" but we kept thinking it would either 1) get better 2) we would eventually Get It or 3) We watched it this far so there is no point switching it off now.

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• Amusing series of vignettes that never does come together

  ninako1242015-10-18

  I had the pleasure of viewing High-Rise at a recent film festival. I went in with high expectations, which gave way to boredom and the anticipation of the end of the showing. The actors absolutely fulfilled all expectations. The performances are all highly nuanced and look natural, rather than put on. Hiddleston goes above and beyond to give one of the arguably best performances of his career. The mise-en-scene of each scene is meticulously crafted and beautifully shot. So what, exactly, tipped high expectations into boredom? For one, the film never does come together, never gives off the feeling of a cohesive whole, but rather of a series of vignettes. Each vignette is, of course, beautifully shot, but the disconnect they cause makes it impossible to empathize with any of the characters. Additionally, suspension of disbelief is near impossible. Why do the characters make the choices they do? What drives them to this madness? Overall, I would recommend this piece to very loyal fans of any of the actors or to cinephiles with a high degree of patience. 6.5/10

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• High-Rise's allegory of class divide gets lost in a dull montage of blood, sweat and blue paint

  Hawkensian2016-04-17

  Ben Wheatley is one of the most exciting British directors working today. His two best films are Kill List, a deeply disturbing horror/thriller about a tormented contract killer, and Sightseers, a black comedy about a troubled couple on their parochial, psychopathic honeymoon. Key to these films' success are strong characters with interesting dynamics. Kill List begins almost like a domestic kitchen-sink drama centred on the failing relationship between Jay (Neil Maskell) and Shel (MyAnna Burning), but it subsequently evolves, or rather devolves, into something dark, dank and horrible in a most unpredictable manner. Sightseers may be most commonly remembered for its scenes of outlandish violence, such as when Chris (Steve Oram) deliberately runs over a litterer in a fit of righteous anger. However, underneath the comic outbursts of gore is the poignant relationship between Chris and Tina (Alice Lowe), an oddball pair with a past of loneliness and insecurity. Having proved himself as a director of visceral horror and emotional substance, Ben Wheatley is the natural choice to direct J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, a Goldingesque tale of violent class war exploding within a brutalist tower block. The fragility of civilisation, and the primitive savagery that lurks beneath it, is a darkly fascinating subject that has made for excellent films and books, such as Threads, a devastating vision of post- apocalyptic Britain, and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, which needs no introduction. High-Rise does not brush shoulders with such works, for its allegory of class divide gets lost in a dull montage of blood, sweat and blue paint. Oh, and dancing air hostesses, for reasons that are, to put it politely, enigmatic. The focal characters – Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a measured, middle class doctor; Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller), a sultry woman who serves as Laing's gateway in to upper floors' high culture; Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), a pugnaciously aspirational documentary maker; and Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), the patrician architect who designed the building – are introduced well enough, but ultimately do not receive sufficient development. As the lead and perhaps most relatable character, we are in the body of Laing when he traverses the tower's social scene, which he admits to 'not being very good at'. Some may find him steely, but Laing has an affable reserve and high emotional intelligence. He isn't particularly interested in the petty one-upmanship that comes with climbing the social ladder, but he manages to deftly negotiate it anyway through his insouciant reserve that maintains peoples' interest and disarms any potential enemies. Hiddleston, one of Britain's hottest exports, is well cast here, he delivers the best performance of the film. However, after a competent introduction to society in the high rise, Laing and the others get lost in an incoherent narrative that favours aesthetics and absurdity over credible character interplay. It begins three months ahead of the main events, showing a blood spattered Laing roasting a dog's leg over a fire surrounded by dirt and detritus. After the introductory period of around thirty minutes, the film then charts what led to this repellent spectacle with a disjointed series of set pieces that give little sense of progression. Electrical problems are plaguing the building and resentment is brewing between the upper and lower floors, but the descent into nihilism just… happens. Dogs are being drowned, Laing's painting his apartment (and himself) like a total madman and the whole building becomes a rubbish-strewn nightmare – but there's no tension, no crescendo, no credibility and, curiously, no one who considers leaving! The worsening relations should have been more gradual and given much greater depth and meaning by the characters, their dialogue and their relationships. Instead, the main character covers himself in paint to communicate his increasingly aberrant state of mind, which appears to be an obvious metaphor for tribal decorations. High-Rise fails as a film about primal savagery and particularly as a film about class. In Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, I cringed as Jasmine and her husband Hal, arrogant members of New York high society, barely contained their raging superiority complexes as they awkwardly condescended to Ginger (Jasmine's sister) and Augie, a decidedly blue collar couple who wonder at Hal and Jasmine's luxurious home. No such realist interplay is to be found in High-Rise, because its characters are thinly drawn and it isn't rooted in reality, which is very much to its detriment. Towards the film's end, there are moments in which Royal and his minions discuss the politics and future of the tower, with Royal remarking that the lower floors should be 'Balkanised', meaning that they should be fragmented and pitted against each other in a manner reminiscent of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. I liked the use of that phrase, there should have been a lot more of this in the script, more overt political manoeuvring rather than surrealist claptrap and brutalist 70s chic. Alas, Wheatley's High-Rise is more concerned with aesthetics and the 1970s, which means there's more in the way of shag-pile carpets, dodgy hair and the colour brown than developed characters, coherent narrative structure and sociopolitical substance. 58% www.hawkensian.com

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