High-Rise

This is one of the most surreal films I’ve ever seen, with all kinds of resulting impressions in my head: that the dreamy and nightmarish alternating qualities of the world Laing moves through are representative of his own internal and unexpressed turmoil, a private struggle to establish identity and purpose in a purposeless world that has been externalised and portrayed by the other residents of the tower; that it is a disturbing vision of what human society would be like if we did not bend our heads and knees to the laws and the law officers we’ve artificially constructed around ourselves to hem in our worst, impulsive and destructive instincts; that it is a resonant paean to the necessity of class war, the use of deliberate anarchy and direct action to topple the blood-sucking 1% who live off the rest of us and hold most of the capital – or as Blackadder said, ‘The whole world cries out peace, freedom, and a few less fat bastards eating all the pies.’

Robert Laing has moved into a new high-rise tower designed and built by Anthony Royal, one of five in Royal’s creation, among the first to be built as it is fully occupied but suffering from all kinds of teething problems. ‘An investment in the future,’ is Laing’s reason for buying himself the ‘cell’ that he occupies: a bland grey apartment as dingy and ugly as the rest of the tower, which looks like an eyesore compared to today’s glinting skyscrapers of gleaming glass and polished steel in modern London. I see them on the train in and out, the grasping digits of the financial district reaching towards the sky, and that’s Royal’s vision for his five towers: the lake beneath is a palm and his towers the fingers enclosing it. The eponymous high-rise is supposed to have all conveniences – central heating, air conditioning no doubt, lifts, garbage chutes, balconies on the upper floors to survey the city at dizzying height, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, even a supermarket with competitive prices. Dark, chunky, brutalist  in its architecture, it is a sinister setting for a dystopian story.

At first glance the two thousand neighbours living cheek by jowl inside seem to get along, for Laing is welcomed by the Wilders below, single mother Charlotte Melville the floor above, and is even summoned for an intriguing interview by Anthony Royal himself, who no longer leaves the glamorous penthouse – which comes complete with its own large garden on the roof of the high-rise, large enough for his wife to ride a white horse around and for a black sheep, beribboned and curiously out of place, to roam around cropping the lawn. Laing attends parties with upper and lower neighbours, trying to find a place, and has an amorous encounter with Charlotte that’s interrupted post-coitus by her small son.

But despite Royal’s vision of harmony and a self-contained, perfectly functioning community, there are widening cracks in the society of the high-rise, rooted in continuous service issues for the lower floors that aggravate them into feeling (quite rightly) that they’re being treated as second class citizens, and in the snobbery of the upper floors, who look down their noses at everyone else. I cringed when Laing was invited to a party in the penthouse. He came so smartly dressed only to find everyone else in eighteenth century French costumes like extras from the Sun King’s court, and there’s a familiar swooping feeling in the belly, that sense that you have been deliberately left out of vital information in order to humiliate you; even in the ‘slippery’ mask that Laing wears, you can see that sick feeling creeping across his face. Painfully uncomfortable after a joke that he’s ‘come as a dilettante’, he’s soon thrown out by one of Royal’s go-betweens, the brutish Simmons, although Royal himself was unaware.

Revolution spreads as the high rise’s facilities crumble. In the supermarket, residents fight viciously over dwindling food supplies, with Laing getting into a wild, rolling on the floor brawl over a tin of paint, as in his breakdown he becomes obsessed with colouring his drab apartment in the perfect shade of blue, getting covered in paint himself. The characters’ appearances degenerate as society breaks down; bloodied, bruised, filthy, sodden and smeared. The elite shed their fancy costumes in favour of reality-denying orgies cooped up in the penthouse, although they must acknowledge in little ways that things are not what they’re meant to be: their dinner parties so reduced in menu they have to eat Royal’s horse. After kidnappings, killings, beatings, even the rape of Charlotte by the mentally fraying Wilder when he finds out her privileges stem from being the mother of Royal’s illegitimate son, the bacchanal of anarchic violence culminates when Wilder confronts Royal in the penthouse. Believing the architect responsible for the evils of the high-rise and the abduction of his heavily pregnant wife, Wilder shoots Royal in the chest – and is killed in his turn by the polished women who have accumulated in the penthouse, wielding steak knives, like maenads in a frenzy of bloodlust avenging the fall of Dionysus.

I would give it a 7 out of 10.