We follow a new resident, pathologist Dr Robert Laing (played by Tom Hiddleston), as a series of minor infrastructural faults and power failures begin to plague the building. The high rise is segregated into three social strata: the lower classes live near the bottom of the building, the middle classes halfway up and the higher echelons of society at the top. It is designed by a wealthy and aloof architect, who lives in a loveless marriage with his snobbish wife in the building’s penthouse. High-Rise tells the story of a modernist apartment block kitted out with every convenience – fitted kitchens and hi-tech waste disposal, a swimming pool and a supermarket. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise, a powerful satire of class resentment in British culture. His latest feature, released in the UK in March this year, adapts for the screen J.G. All of this is given an extra shot of toxicity by the psychological poisoning every citizen – from humble to high-born – receives from the class system at birth.īritish filmmaker Ben Wheatley understands this well. The casual brutality of the street beatings on the night bus home football hooligans and fascist blockheads inner-city gangs fighting turf wars anonymous assaults in the city and brawls outside the village pub. And, more commonly, for the traditional sport of what Alex, the delinquent narrator of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), called ‘the old ultraviolence’. Britain has always provided a home for violence – as a place to invade and a place for waging wars of land, religion and trade.

High rise by jg ballard