High-Rise review – Tom Hiddleston surfs through a confused, and confusing, tower block class-hop

High-Rise stars Tom Hiddleston as Dr Robert Laing. He lives on the 27^th floor of a tower block built for the affluent. The well-off live in the lower floors, the rich – like Laing – in the middle, the super-rich at the top. Life, insulated and protected, is idyllic, until the power structure starts to shift. The lower residents climb the High-Rise and all hell breaks loose.

Ballard saw how society reacts to a grand mal seizure when he grew up in a Shanghai internment camp. Society is fragile: we’re a cross word away from raping or killing our neighbour. He wanted to strip away the sheen – but director Ben Wheatley layers it all back on. His vision is weirdly glossy, with the story set in the 70s (the book was published in 1975); the combination of the low-ish budget production values and the wry tone makes the film feel like a pastiche.

Crucially, the delineation of the class system isn’t made clear, so the breakdown feels like a non-event. Luke Evans plays Richard Wilder, a lower floor resident who – in the book – starts an ascent that makes for a twisted take on class-hopping. He’s murderous and repellent, but he’s aspirational, and this lends a sense of order to the chaos. Here – thrown into a stylistic orgy of campy nihilism – Wilder just feels like another of the players.

Hiddleston surfs the confusion with ease. His tendency to look detached works well in a setting where the rules have been thrown to the wind. Amy Jump’s script fleshes out Laing, painting him as the most dangerous type of man of all: a man who sees the world falling apart around him and does nothing but learn how to adapt. Among the useful items he picks up on his trip around the tower are Wilder’s wife, Helen (Elisabeth Moss) and Charlotte Melville (Sienna Milller), a pragmatist who sees the fall coming and learns the new rules quickly. Miller is on good form here, corroding Melville’s essential decency as the uproar roils on.

Wheatley has made High-Rise his story, instead of Ballard’s. That’s fine – but, unfortunately, it’s a less interesting take. The director’s puckishness starts to grate pretty quickly. In one scene a gang of Royal’s armed enforcers roam the upper floors. One of their weapons is a Bafta statuette. The in-joke feels brash, rather than clever.

In some ways this is a creative adventure. It shows Wheatley for the first time stretching his talent to fit a film with stars and expectation. It’s not a disaster, but the faults stack up. It took nearly 40 years for High-Rise to make it to big screen. After all that time, this is a bit of a dog’s dinner.