“High-Rise,” a wildly over-stylized dystopian satire set in (you guessed it) a towering apartment building, is the kind of movie that makes you want to go make a movie because you’re sure you could do it better. And that’s the best thing going for it.
Not that the film’s ensemble cast is to blame. Sienna Miller and Elisabeth Moss, playing women in complex relationships with children and men, are acting right in their respective sweet spots — as is Jeremy Irons, the brooding, omnipresent architect of the futuristic high-rise. Per the studied nightmare of J.G. Ballard, from whose novel the film was adapted, Irons all too thoughtfully allows his penthouse to become a hungover, debauched palace, the floors beneath slipping into barbarism after a power outage gives the building’s residents a ready excuse to self-actualize their basest urges.
But the film is putatively a vehicle for Tom Hiddleston — the darkly dreamy actor’s actor who scored big as Loki in the Thor movies but is best seen starring as the oblique and inscrutable hero of AMC’s brilliant miniseries “The Night Manager.” There, one of the characters closest to Hiddleston is reduced to calling him “a funny fish.” In “High-Rise,” Hiddleston’s quietly sociopathic yuppie is too two-dimensional, not too complex, to get close to. And what goes for Hiddleston’s hollow core goes for the whole film’s. Time and again, I felt that the frustrations of watching “High-Rise” resolutely refuse to be fully human couldn’t adequately be expressed or expunged by criticism alone. Someone, somewhere, had to respond by creating something better.
After all, “High-Rise” doesn’t really work as a creation because it’s so concerned with being a critique. When the architect’s young son winds up raptly listening to a Margaret Thatcher speech amid his father’s ruins (did I mention the film’s “Days of Future Past” conceit, set in an alternate-universe late 1970s?) it’s clear what kind of politics the husband-and-wife team of director Ben Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump want to put on trial. But it’s their embrace of the culture of criticism, not their specific partisan preference, that makes the film fail. They’re so keen to deconstruct a certain kind of destructive power that they themselves can only wreak havoc — on the source material, on the basic conventions of movie storytelling, and on the patience and spirit of the audience. Rapes, murders, and safely staged animal cruelty flare up and fade out. Creatively, nothing new or old is achieved.
Still, in a testament to the creative power of art even in the most choked or barren of circumstances, one green shoot of penetrating wisdom does sprout up. Faced with a sly insurrection among his inner circle, the architect pointedly reminds a top lackey that he’s still just an employee. “I don’t work for you,” the henchman slurs back. “I work for the building.” Although “High-Rise” refuses to acknowledge it, for fear of where the insight might lead, the building really is the film’s main character — not futuristic or capitalistic at all, but a brutalist, well-night Stalinist monolith. The premise of the “lifestyles” available inside the high-rise is a hostile critique of humanity. There, prospects for human creation are picked apart until there’s nothing left.
And so, in a deeply creepy way, “High-Rise” unwittingly takes on the destructively critical character of the high-rise itself. The film’s architects think they’re in charge, but the real boss is the cult of criticism they’ve trapped themselves willfully within. At a moment when art is under constant threat of “politicization” by self-appointed culture police who insist all creations be critically deconstructed, “High-Rise” is at best a cautionary tale to creative professionals and amateurs alike. Whether in a building or in a society, a system full of critics can’t create. It can only destroy.
