WC
I f**king love Ben Wheatley. Not only does he make daring, challenging movies, but he manages to consistently divide the critics (and audiences) in doing so. At a time where every film is viewed to have some quantifiable level of quality and the key of criticism is to get your rating as close to the universal average, rather than provide a proper, personal assessement, he’s an anarchic presence who begs you to think independently.
High Rise is a psychological thriller starring Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons and Sienna Miller. An impressive cast, but is it any good?
TRR: Blending dark humor with an at-times-grim, at-times-glossy, retro vision of the future, director Ben Wheatley's adaptation of the 1975 J.G. Ballard novel suffers from an incohesive narrative. However, High-Rise is visually mesmerizing, and its themes still feel as topical and as timely as ever.
AVClub: High-Rise, a darkly funny adaptation by cult English director Ben Wheatley (Kill List, A Field In England) of the J.G. Ballard novel of the same title, preserves the book’s ’70s setting, steeping its vision of a toppling society in retro decadence: brutalist apartments carpeted in ankle-high, cream-colored shag; flight attendants in red uniforms dancing in a pill-induced dream; women in tunic dresses slumping into sectional sofas or against walls of ribbed concrete, drinks in hand. An orchestral arrangement of ABBA’s “SOS” swells on the soundtrack as a man is thrown out of a costume party and into a futuristic elevator with mirrored walls. A super-modern apartment building on the outskirts of London, shaped like a Jenga tower frozen in its first moment of collapse, forms an ecosystem of excess, consumption, and delirium. The sunlight that cuts through its slit windows is the color of champagne.
