By Drew Dietsch
| Published
“… Sometimes he had a hard time not to believe that they lived in the future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.” – JG Ballard
The future is something that we consider constantly as humans. Not in a casual “What is dinner tonight?” path. I’m talking about the future. Our dreams and nightmares on the place where civilization, society, technology and humanity are all heading.
And right now, I must say that the future is dark. One of the greatest factors of this terrible feeling that so many people have about the future comes down to an increasing division and never more apparent between the rich and the rest of us.
It is difficult not to see a few very selected people at the top make life miserable for all of us.
Obviously, this is not a problem that arose overnight and many great works of art explored history at war.
But, there is a story that has gnawing at me since I declared my 2016 film No. 1. A film that has not become more powerful and terrifying every year. A story of brutal, dark, absurd and unpleasant science fiction that makes the perfect couple with the apparent proper shift in our world in exasperating dystopia.
And Loki is in it! Naked!
High -rise
It is High -riseA film everywhere will tell you that you were released in 2015, but these are all dates of the film festival that do not count. The wide release took place in 2016. It is a 2016 film. IMDB and Wikipedia can be folded.
High -riseThe 2016 film is based on the 1975 novel by JG Ballard. Ballard was best known for having written post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction that treated ideas on societal decomposition and basic nature of human beings.
In High -riseThe story focuses on Robert Laing, a new tenant in a modern apartments complex that offers everything you need to exist in current life. For example, there is a whole floor of the building which is a supermarket so that residents do not even need to go to shop.
It becomes clear that the building is strongly divided by class and this is deliberately maintained by the various floors, the rich exorbitant filles the highest floors and the poorest tenants occupying apartments below.
Things collapse
As the story progresses, the inhabitants of the building are starting to undergo power outages as they become more and more dependent on the building for their daily life. People cease to go to their work, parents stop sending children to school, and there seems to be an entire civilization that forms in the skyscraper which is aimed at the basic journeys of the humanity.
All this is presented with the very clear metaphor of the skyscraper itself. While this social apocalypse degenerates, the rich decadents continue to live on the highest floors and even a descent into the lower floors for supplies and to attack poor tenants in darkness during breakdowns.
When the time has come to transform Ballard’s novel into a film, the writer Amy Jump and the director Ben Wheatley made a very conscious and full choice in the adaptation. Ballard’s novel gives no final year for the events that take place, but it is supposed to be considered a very close future as part of its guardian.
The future has already occurred
THE High -rise The film defined history in 1975, the same year that the novel was released. At the beginning, reasoning to this may seem like a chance to engage in certain nostalgic styles such as the fashion of the time or the overall aesthetic of design.
But the line of Ballard’s novel which finds its way in the voiceover of the film very early is the one that started this video and is the key to understanding High -rise Like a film.
By putting the film in the 1970s and presenting his story as an example of societal decline, he pleads for the creative thesis of Ballard presented in this brilliant line. The future that has been promised to you is the one you are experiencing at the moment, and it has already been drained. We will come back to this.
It must be said that even if High -rise is one of my favorite films, I recognize that it will not be a film for … Well, probably most people. This is a film where a dog is killed and ate in the first two minutes, then another dog is assassinated by drowning. If I learned something from my decades to watch, write and talk about films, it is that the public really does not like when the puppies die in your film.
It is only worse
And the rest of the film will not be much more happy. Tom Hiddleston Plays Robert Laing and his observations on the building and its inhabitants lead to a character that many people will probably hate. Laing is a cold man looking for what could lead to a real human connection, but he also plays a dark stuffing on a child rich in the building that leads to horrible suicide.
The journey and the philosophy of Laing then become very passive as the building descends in chaos and anarchy. This is the kind of character that probably works better in written form, but I think Hiddleston gives one of his most lying performances in High -rise.
It is also a film with a very nicious sense of humor. As I mentioned, all that little “eat a dog” comes from the first line of Ballard’s novel, and it is supposed to be a bit black comedy. A similar example is when Laing sits for dinner with the building architect, Anthony Royal (played by Jeremy Irons), who asks Laing his thoughts on the building while someone shouts in the background.
When seen from this angle, there is a lot of black absurdity in which I like High -riseIn particular Luke Evans like Richard Wilder, one of the tenants of the building who, as you tell you, succumbs to his wildest impulses and behaviors. Evans is dislocated, launching the spindle and the total goblin mode. It is ridiculous and tragic in an equal measure.
But, High -rise is not packaged in the factory in its presentation. Clint Mansell’s score is properly psychotic, from Regal Bombast to childish fantasy at any time and is not the kind of musical experience made so that the public feels comfortable.
The general aspect of the film is exceptionally polite, but dreaming is not something that the traditional public will click with it. I love it because it emphasizes idyllic dreams of progress and comfort consumed slowly by the nightmares inherent in the human condition.
And that means that we get a sequence defined on a Portishead coverage of “SOS” of Abba which is one of the best things of the last decade.
I could talk about High -rise For hours, but one of the reasons I wanted to make a video is the hope that at least one person will discover High -rise Because they saw this video. So, I don’t want to separate everything in the film.
But, the other reason I felt High -rise The deserved highlighting is because I see a lot of people starting to discover this High -rise Was talking about in 2016.
The rich and the rest of us
It seems that we are in the midst of a great cultural conscience of the austere division between the wealthy and the deprived. Many of us realize that the future we have been sold was never going to be possible. It was someone’s dream who had already happened and is now exhausted.
At the end of High -riseLaing has found happiness. It is by realizing that the social construction created by the post-apocalyptic company of the great height is probably the best reflection of humanity in all its animal nature. And he waits for the other height nearby to find the same descent into barbaric happiness.
It is not an optimistic end, it is a dark end, but that I cannot help but feel a dark truth. So many people seem to wait for the powder bar of society to explode, and many of this feeling comes back to want the upper class to feel the same turmoil as others know.
High -rise is quite explicit in its metaphorical dismantling of capital society, in particular at the end with a childhood character listening to a program of Margaret Thatcher, and I think that many more people were now going to vibrate with the mentality of the film on the inherent dissonance of capitalism with human nature.
I hope the world will not eventually reflect High -rise But I throw the dog recipes in case.
