HIGH-RISE: Jump Cuts

Director: Ben Wheatley
Writer: Amy Jump
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy
Runtime: 119 mins.
2016

I've never seen a movie edited like High-Rise. It's a 1970's period piece follows the occupants of a towering apartment complex. The narrative focuses in particular on neurophysiologist Laing (Tom Hiddleston). The socially stratified high-rise--richer up top, poorer at the bottom--provides all necessary amenities to its occupants, including food, drink, schooling, and entertainment. One would never need to leave the high-rise if one were so inclined, and that is exactly what happens. Its occupants are sequestered there by their own vague need to stick around, even after the parties turn sour, the rich begin siphoning resources from the poor, and the social system careens into violent anarchy.

More than anything High-Rise reminds me of the early Cronenberg film Shivers. The reality of this world is just off-kilter enough to be especially disturbing and surreal. Characters make choices that they only seem to be loosely in control of, and everybody tacitly refuses to acknowledge the weirdness cropping up around them.

What truly defines this film's unique tone, though, is the way the editing slips in and out of scenes like a moray eel. A great deal of High-Rise is told in montage, buoyed by Clint Mansell's brilliant score.* This formal choice emphasizes the passage of time and thrusts the viewer into a dreamlike state. We get snippets of clips that can more or less fit into our conception of the plot, but large chunks of these montages feel unmoored from reality. Deprived of context and set to music, even everyday moments, like forgetting something and turning around to retrieve it, seem uncanny and bizarre. Then there are clips of Laing dancing down a hallway with what appear to be five stewardesses dressed in red, and you have no idea what you are watching.

*No question, in the running for best soundtrack of 2016. Unsurprising coming from Mansell, whose work on Moon was the first film score I ever loved.

These alienating storytelling methods do become exhausting after a while, but they never lose their bite. High-Rise may be to on-the-nose to achieve the allegorical insight it's shooting for, but the result is a treat of crackling madness nonetheless. Watching High-Rise is like stepping into a Normal Rockwell painting that slowly morphs into a Dali. Director Ben Wheatley and writer/co-editor Amy Jump paste together a uniquely offputting experience from a great many familiar elements, which is one of the prime gifts of art: seeing old things in a new way.

3 / 5  BLOBS