NB: All the triggers. Seriously, all of them. Yes, even that one. Not kidding. 

Many of us at this site are Tom Hiddleston fans, and thus many of us are no doubt considering seeing High Rise, a movie in which our dear boy wears nothing but a strategically placed brochure.

 

 

As it happens, High Rise is available for rent on iTunes ahead of theatrical release on May 13, so I checked it out on behalf of all who share my affection for The Hiddles.

The verdict: This movie is good in a very specific way, but for a movie that features lots and lots of sex it’s completely unsexy. Is Tom pretty? Sure. Is he attractive, which I regard as a completely different quality? No, not remotely. The moral of this movie seems to be “Everyone is awful.” The movie is a wickedly nasty satire with the darkest humor in the history of ever. It is not a sexy romp.

High Rise is an adaptation of a novel by J. G. Ballard, and there are only four things you absolutely have to know about it in order to make you choice regarding whether to see it or not:

1. The very first scene involves Tom Hiddleston eating a dog. This is not the only dog (not to mention horse) to die in the course of the movie.
2. The message is the movie is that people are awful. In service of this message there is an enormous amount of onscreen and implied violence including but not limited to rape and domestic violence.
3. The movie only makes sense on a metaphorical level. I’m all about metaphor and even I found it off-putting that it made so little sense on a logical level.
4. Despite the fact that I, personally, did not enjoy the movie, I did respect it as a technical achievement and I have to admit that some of the lines are pretty damn funny. The cinematography, acting, costume, set design, and music are amazing.

High Rise is a speculative fiction dystopian movie set in a sort of alternate 1970’s. There are many signs that it’s the early 1970s, not the least of which is that all the adults, including a very pregnant woman (Helen, played by Elisabeth Moss) smoke and drink non-stop. The characters may run out of food and water, but the alcohol and cigarettes are endless.

Architect Anthony Royal (played by Jeremy Irons, who does his very best Jeremy Irons thing) designed a high-rise building as a “social experiment,” one so self-contained that residents won’t feel a need to leave except for work. It has a supermarket and a gym and a pool. The wealthiest residents live on the top floors and one decreases in status the closer to the ground one lives. Royal lives on the top floor, with a giant terrace garden. Helen (the pregnant woman) and her husband Wilder, played by Luke Evans, live on one of the bottom floors. Tom Hiddleston’s character, Dr. Laing, lives in the middle, which means he socializes with both upper and lower floors. As a new resident, and one of the few with any social mobility, he is the audience surrogate. He’s also mad as toast.

One problem with the film is that if one is to believe that Eden falls, one must first believe in Eden, and the High Rise looks awful from the get go. It’s sterile and joyless and sad. Even Laing’s first sexual liaison with single mom Charlotte, played by Sienna Miller, seems void of any kind of happiness or satisfaction. Charlotte has a tendency to ask awkward questions and launch into philosophical discussion during sex, which is both uncomfortable and funny. Her purring, “There’s a social hierarchy” into Laing’s ear as they fornicate on the balcony is a line reading for the ages. Later, when the orgies start up, even the people at the orgies seem bored. The only person having any fun at all is a woman who rides into a party on the back of a horse, raises her champagne glass to the sky, and yells, “Who here is going to fuck me in the ass?” Sister, I salute you, because at least you show some enthusiasm for the proceedings.

The orgies represent a societal breakdown that happens as the building also begins to break down. At the start of the movie, there are tensions between the floors. As the movie progresses, the building has more and more problems. The trash chutes get clogged, so bags of trash pile up in rooms and hallways. The power flickers on and off and finally is lost. The market runs out of food (no one buys food elsewhere, because metaphor, instead they eat dog food and, on occasion, dog). As the building deteriorates, society deteriorates, and quickly goes from people having fun black out parties in the halls to people attacking each other, sometimes for no apparent reason, sometimes over buried resentments, and sometimes over incredibly petty things. One character wants to kill Laing for his tie (notably, Laing always wears a dress shirt and a tie, even when painting, even when fighting, and even while having sex). Laing himself gets in a brutal fight over the last can of paint in the supermarket. “It’s MY PAINT!” he yells, like a two year old.

In order to understand the movie, you have to be very focused on the fact that the movie is all metaphor. There’s no actual reason that people can’t move, or go shopping at a grocery store down the street. They live in what’s implied to be an actual, functioning city. We know that people leave for work and come home, so they could totally stop in at the store on the way, or say, “Heck with this, I’m moving!” or “By golly, I think the police should have a look at all this rape and murder!” The fact that they voluntarily choose to stay at the high rise, and that they become increasingly obsessed with what happens there to the point where most of them stop leaving entirely, is part of the metaphor. The story makes no logical sense at all but as pure metaphor-based satire it works – kind of.

I expect that this movie is much better on a second or even a third viewing, because on a first viewing the watcher is too busy to figure out what the hell is happening to catch all the bizarre jokes. I mean, if you can go with the metaphor flow and if you can get your brain into a grim enough mindset, then this movie is funny as shit, which is a very strange thing to say about a movie that is full of the most horrible things. The upper-class twits are a never-ending source of incongruity. “He’s raping people he’s not supposed to, and to top it all off he shat in Mercer’s attaché case!” one of them says, a short line that contains multiple levels of horror, humor, and social commentary. At one point, the upper class twits decide to have a party, and to raid the lower floors for supplies. They make a list. “Cocktail onions,” they write, carefully, with great concentration. The lower floors get their shots in, too. As Helen says, after having sex with Laing, “Charlotte was right, you are the best amenity in the building!”

This film is populated almost entirely with characters who are horrible people. Even the kids are creepy. The men are unfailingly misogynistic and most display physical violence towards their wives or lovers. Laing does not – however, in two different scenes he can hear, through the walls, the screams of a woman he has slept with, and in both cases he seems unconcerned – not conflicted, like “Oh no, it’s too dangerous to go out there,” but more “Not my apartment, not my problem.” The only character I found to be sympathetic at all was Helen, who tries to be a decent mom and who, after being a doormat for most of the movie, finally shows some backbone against her husband.

I struggled with how to grade this. It was almost a DNF, but I soldiered through (because I rented in on iTunes I could watch half of it on one day and half on the other – I don’t think I could have managed two straight hours). Based on my personal enjoyment, it was an F. But when you grade something, you really have to think about what the material is trying to accomplish. As a satire and a piece of surrealist filmmaking, I can’t in good conscience give it less than a B-. In addition to the technical accomplishments I mentioned above, the acting is ferocious. Tom becomes wackier and wackier. Luke Evans prowls the halls with his camera, like a tiger (at one point, he actually starts growling). I’ve also noted that now that the movie is over, it feels funnier – I’m remembering lines and cackling evilly now that I’m not busy going “WTF JUST HAPPENED.”

However, while this may be good on a technical and satirical level, it’s pretty awful stuff in the sense of forcing the viewer to voyeuristically observe depravity for no purpose other than to suggest that people suck. I know many readers of this site have huge triggers around abuse, rape, and animal death, and to those readers I can’t warn you enough that this is a very triggery movie. It’s much less joyless than the trailer suggests (I do think the trailer is brilliant). My advice is, unless you like Lord of the Flies, stay away from this movie and admire this photo instead.

High Rise is available to rent from Amazon Prime, iTunes, and Google:Play!