Butler's Cinema Scene

Tom Hiddleston

“HIGH-RISE” My rating: C+

119 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Duration is the enemy of allegory.

At 50 minutes Ben Wheatley’s “High-Rise” would have been a stunning achievement — a vicious, snarling, breathless satire of class warfare and social apocalypse.

At two hours, though, it’s a slog, one that very nearly wears out its welcome and ends up repeating itself like a 33-record with a track-skipping scratch.

Screenwriter Amy Jump’s adaptation of the 1975 novel by J.G. Ballard (Crash) bears more than a few  similarities to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and especially to the the recent cult hit “Snowpiercer.”  Just replace the hermetically sealed high-speed train with an equally isolated high-rise apartment complex.

We are introduced to this modern Tower of Babel through the new tenant, Liang (Tom Hiddleston, who seems to be everywhere nowadays: “I Saw the Light,” TV’s “The Night Manager,” Marvel movies).  An unmarried M.D. with more money than he knows what to do with, Liang takes an apartment about halfway up the 30-plus story edifice.

The tower has all the amenities of a decent-sized town: health spa, swimming pool, school, a traditional English garden on the rooftop complete with livestock. There’s even a grocery store that sells only generic products (“Thank you for shopping on floor 15”). Alas, the place is chilly and sterile, all poured concrete and glass. Which is fine with Liang, who has no furniture and never gets around to unpacking his boxes.

It quickly dawns on the newcomer that the building has a social pecking order.  Towering over everyone else in his penthouse is the symbolically named Royal (Jeremy Irons), the architect who designed the building and is forever tinkering with improvements meant to validate his experiment in social engineering.

Just below Royal are the wealthy aristocrats embodied by the sneering, pompous Pangbourne (James Purfoy).

Then come the mid-level residents like Liang and Charlotte (Sienna Miller), the salacious single mom whose bright young son (Louis Suc) is building what looks like a homemade bomb.

Below Liang are residents like Wilder (“The Hobbit’s” Luke Evans), an aggressive and rabble-rousing documentary film maker, and his ever-pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss).It’s far from a paradise, though. There are no views, unless you’re impressed by a vast parking lot and a scarred-earth industrial wasteland. And even though it has only been in operation for a few months, the place is already starting to break down. The elevators frequently grind to a stop, lights flicker and go out for hours, water refuses to gush from the taps. Royal explains that the building is still “settling.”

Before long the hallways are jammed with uncollected plastic bags bursting with trash. Residents get into fistfights over the last remaining items on the grocery shelves. At night full-blown orgies erupt around the swimming pool; during the day housewives hand wash their laundry in the rapidly fouling water.

These irritations only exacerbate the tension between those on the upper stories and their poorer brethren closer to ground level. Wilder foments a revolution (he’s got a poster of Che in his apartment); in response right-wing death squads soon are patrolling the building.

One night Liang is taken and dangled over a balcony railing. He’s only saved by the intervention of Royal, who indignantly protests that “You can’t put him over the edge. He owes me a game of squash.” That’s an argument even a bloodthirsty aristocrat has to honor.

In terms of visual and thematic ambition, “High-Rise” is a step forward for Wheatley, a bracingly perverse filmmaker whose earlier efforts (“Kill List,” “Sightseers”) concisely and economically dipped into the bloodthirsty side of human nature.

Particularly effective is his presentation of a world based on the best pre-digital technology.

But despite a couple of tour de force set pieces, “High-Rise” gradually loses steam. One issue is Hiddleston’s Liang — the guy’s pretty much a cipher, certainly nobody to hang a movie on.  Other players are obviously having fun with their over-the-top characters, but even this wears thin as  you realize they’re portraying social castes, not individuals.

A few moments of brilliance, yes.  But not enough.

| Robert W. Butler