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Everyone always thinks that adapting a book into a film is rather easy. After all, we often imagine them as a move in our heads when we read them, so surely you just need to do that, but in film! However, it’s not that simple. Because there is essentially a third or first narration, it’s very easy for books to spew exposition and lore and you actually enjoy it. In film, exposition has to be given away in dialogue, which if done badly is simply excruciating to watch. That’s why some books are deemed unfilmable. J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise is one of them, but here we are with a film adaptation. So is it any good?
Surgeon Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston, The Avengers) moves into a new build tower block after the death of his sister. The block has everything you could want in it, a supermarket, a pool and many interesting people, and soon the residents become disinterested in the outside world. And as they realise that some of the residents have more than others, things start to deteriorate.
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Something that the director Ben Wheatley (Kill List) does well is to make this place feel really wrong and disturbing. Even at the start where everything seems to be pretty pleasant, something always feels a bit off. And quite honestly, I’m not sure how Wheatley manages it, which is testament to his ability to sneak this feeling on us without us noticing. The sets are pretty standard for the time period it’s based on and apart from a tendency to pull off some brilliant artwork shots, there’s nothing too bizarre about the cinematography. I think it’s down to the music, which is definitely noticeable. It has this otherworldly feeling to it which does make think you’ve entered a completely different sort of place, even though it seems so familiar.
The reason many people called the book unfilmable is due to the protagonist. A lot of Ballard novels don’t follow the normal rules of storytelling with the protagonist being the driving force for the narrative, and instead make him more like an observer. While this works in a book, it doesn’t really work in a film because it feels as if we are missing out on all of the action if we can’t get inside the person’s head to see what they think of the events taking place. Wheatley acknowledges this and makes a good fist of it, with Laing not really getting involved in the parties of the privileged folk on the high floors or the tribulations of those towards the bottom. He instead just talks to them, like an interested observer. This does make the film interestingly different, as in other films Richard Wilder (Luke Evans, Dracula Untold) would probably be the hero, yet here, it’s the guy who does nothing.
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However, this isn’t perfect as the lack of a proactive protagonist is the biggest weakness of the film. The issue with not having one is that we end up with a main character which we don’t really connect with as there’s nothing to connect to. Robert Laing seems to be nice, he’s one of the few people on the higher floors who actually bothers to empathise with those on the bottom floors, but he doesn’t seem to believe in anything. Even though he is a villain, the architect Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons, The Lion King) at least has an aim, a purpose in life. He’s engaging, but despite a great performance from Hiddleston, Laing doesn’t.
It’s pretty easy to tell that there is a lot of political subtext going on in this film. After all, it’s about the rich taking more and more resources until the poor and downtrodden finally have enough and take their revenge. A few more changes and it might as well be a remake of Battleship Potemkin. Usually I’d criticise this, mainly because it’s a plot line done so many different times by so many directors. It’s tired. yet Wheatley brings something different to it by bringing a whole new level of brutality to it. This film is plain nasty at times, and neither side gets off lightly, with both of them showing undeniable cruelty. It’s a war in the building and while there are plenty of losers, there aren’t any winners.
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If you are going to force me to nitpick a bit more, I do have to say that some of the villains are a bit too one dimensional. Oh sure, Royal is brilliant. He’s a guy that had what he thought was a brilliant idea and is determined to make it work, even if it’s plainly not going to. Yet the others, such as his snobbish wife Ann (Keeley Hawes, Death at a Funeral) might as well be from a Saturday morning cartoon. She’s posh and is too signified to enjoy any of the antics from people of the lower floors, so she looks down her nose at them with little to no nuance. It’s frustrating, as with more expansion we could have had a set of truly brilliant villains.
For an adaptation of a supposedly unfilmable book, High-Rise gives it a damned good shot. It’s certainly very good, with a very different take on a story that could be seen as clichéd and while the observer type protagonist does have narrative issues in a film, it’s a great way to look at stories and with some refinement, I’d like to see this sort of storytelling again in a different film. Maybe something original that can be shaped around that conceit. This film is a brutal and disturbing take on isolationism, and despite some flaws, is well worth a watch.
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