High-Rise

Based an a J.G. Ballard book of a future that may have already taken place where a rigid hierarchy is imposed on a self-sustaining, bottled-up, Balkanized residential high-rise that has fallen into chaos. Influenced by Cronenberg’s Shivers but shot in a kaleidoscopic Antonioni-esque cinematic style, as though B.F. Skinner encountered Johnny Rotten in a house of mirrors, Tom Hiddleston stars as Dr. Laing, a middling-class tenant on the 25th floor who bridges the aristocratic upper floor crowd with the cellar dwellers because, as he realizes, all are damaged. With a baroque rock soundtrack that includes ABBA and The Fall, the entire film takes apart ’70s radicalism in beige & grey tones while Jeremy Irons as “the architect” and Luke Evans as the savage reconfigure this status-driven fortress.

[R]