High Rise is a dark and twisted film that also has some laughs, based on a novel by J G Ballard, in which a modern high rise apartment building set in an alternate 1975, and the people who inhabit it devolve together into a Lord of The Flies-like anarchy. The protagonist is Dr R Laing, played by Tom Hiddleston, and he sanguinely accepts all the chaos that erupts around him, partaking equally in the sex and violence without seeming to notice that anything is at all amiss. He lives in an apartment with almost no furniture, with his belongings mostly still in the boxes he moved in with. So in a strange way he settles in without ever really settling in. Jeremy Irons plays Mr Royal, the architect and owner of the building, but that doesn't mean he in in control. In one telling scene, his main go-to lackey tells him "I don't work for you; I work for the building". The parking lot starts out as an endless sea of paved desolation, but it turns out that is the high point, before it winds up looking like a battlefield. I kind of liked this film, but I'm not sure how well I understood it.
TIFF Overview
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