A Roundtable Review of 'High-Rise,' Where Luxury Architecture Turns Dystopic

High-Rise, the latest film by the director Ben Wheatley, adapts J.G. Ballard’s classic science-fiction novel of the same name to gruesome, dark-humored excess. (The film opens in wide release Friday; check out the trailer at the end of this post.)

Tom Hiddleston plays Robert Laing, a mild-mannered neurologist who leases a new life in an East London luxury high rise designed by a powerful architect, Anthony Royal (played by Jeremy Irons). Royal, a brutalist in all senses of the word, describes his building as “a crucible for change” in society, and indeed it is. No more than 25 minutes into the film, the building’s physical decay sets in, first through elevator failures and power outages, then trash pile-ups and dwindling food supplies (in a very Jacques Tati private supermarket). Floors of residents, stratified along class lines and insulated from the outside world, advance this degeneration toward all-out squalor as they orgy, rape, pillage, and murder in a literal struggle to the top.