High-Rise

“Neurologist Dr. Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moves into a pristine tower block in the shiny 1970s, only to see the new society crumble into age-old violence. While J.G. Ballard’s source for this film 40 years old, it still feels alarmingly now. The future he imagined in the 1970s, with its affluenza and anger, couldn’t feel more relevant today. The first of the many smart decisions in this adaptation is to maintain its period setting. As ridiculous as the cars, lapels and shagpile sideburns are, retaining the novel’s era grants High-Rise a compelling air of tragedy.

“The brutalist architecture of post-War regeneration came to represent ugly failure. High-Rise captures the excitement of that sleek, new way of living, and then takes malicious delight in its destruction. This film is both beautiful and grubby; it bathes your eyes but leaves a sticky residue. It is crammed with dreamlike (or at times nightmarish) moments. The chilly eroticism is familiar from producer Jeremy Thomas’ other Ballard adaptation, Crash, but this is more anarchic than Cronenberg’s controversial cult classic.

“Once we are firmly established with the concrete erection and its dubious denizens, incident upon incident of unpleasantness pile up to become almost monotonous. But it’s hard to know how one could wrestle Ballard’s book into a conventional thriller without losing the jagged edge that buries it in the mind. And Wheatley ('A Field in Enlgand') and DP Laurie Rose conjure such restless, arresting images that even if your attention to the plot wanders, you will still want to watch. This is a dazzling, troubling, ugly and unsettling film. Don’t expect a thriller in the seat-edge sense, but you will be thrilled — and repulsed — by this bold, faithful adaptation of Ballard’s ever-prescient picture of First World strife.” - Empire

"In a blockbuster-driven environment, don't expect this to hang around cinemas too long, so get in quickly and see it -- it has cult classic written all over it." - The National