‘High-Rise’ Is Director Ben Wheatley’s Latest Cult Classic

This year marks British indie director Ben Wheatley’s third trip to the Toronto International Film Festival. He was here in 2011 with his contract-killer flick Kill List and again in 2013 for his black-and-white head-trip A Field in England. Now he’s arrived with his latest, an atypically starry bit of speculative dystopia and social commentary called High-Rise.

Based on the novel by J.G. Ballard, High-Rise starts at the end, with a wild-eyed Tom Hiddleston scavenging for food and looking dirty and semi-crazed in a run-down high-rise apartment building in England. Clearly, something has gone wrong and the social order has broken down. And then we flash back several weeks, to Hiddleston — ridiculously handsome and put-together as a young doctor — moving into his new condo apartment. The high-rise is the brainchild of an architect played by Jeremy Irons, and the social stratification, with the obscenely rich on the highest floors and the middle classes literally below them, is intentional. It’s all incredibly blunt, by design. These aren’t exactly impenetrable metaphors, the wealthy gathering at costume parties dressed up like the royal court at Versailles, the poor living in low flats with barely any light. It’s like a vertically integrated Snowpiercer, and it only gets stranger, and more violent, from there.

Wheatley’s previous films haven’t been too terribly alike in terms of plot or genre. Kill List was a thriller about hitmen (until it wasn’t); Sightseers a pitch-black comedy about murderers; A Field in England a period piece/war film/acid trip. And now this social satire influenced by everything from Brazil to Salo. Keep an eye out for it!