Review of High-Rise (2015) by Odjento — 12 May 2016

This first section shall be spoiler free.

High-rise is an unremittingly complex film that whilst being captured beautifully on camera with gorgeous cinematography, fails to hold your attention. There’s a difference to a film holding your hand and a film just letting you fall to your death. The film was allegorical and almost everything was a metaphor but with hardly any guidance it was hard to enjoy it other done visually.

The best analogy I could use for this film is this: if you see a piece in the newspaper where someone has used incredibly confusing and big words like “didactic polemic, a connubially vexed allegory” you may think ‘wow, I can’t understand this but the writer must be good and this must be a good newspaper piece because I can’t understand it’. NO, that is not the job of the writer. The writer must make it at least capable to follow so you can understand what is happening; they can make some stuff cryptic but overall the consumer must be able to have a vague idea of the outline and trajectory of the piece. This film becomes so confusing that you may think it is an amazing film because it is so confusing but it is really just pretentious in the fact that it believes it can be smart without even attempting an explanation at times.

The films editing doesn’t help either as it cuts so rapidly and quickly it’s hard to keep up without feeling like you’re in an autism simulator.

Overall, the film is delicious to look at due to its beautiful cinematography but falls short on the writing side of it.

[SPOILERS AHEAD].

What I got from the film after a while trying to think about it is that the film is a study on society and a kind of chaos effect of developed countries for when our insecurities finally take control and we lose our stability. One woman says “we’re all in debt, just the rich ones deal with it better”, and this is why eventually not only the lower class floors end up in anarchy and power failure but the whole building does, as the building represents a society and shows how it has fallen.

The architect (Jeremy Irons) also says that the High-rise is like a finger, and each finger is linked to the palm. I believe each different High-rise around them is a different finger housing a different society, and once one society falls it gets chopped off from the rest of the finger, therefore becoming independently content but anarchic. The rest of the hand then still functions but finds it more difficult to do certain tasks.

The film then closes with Hiddleston’s character stating “it’s only time until the next High-Rise falls” and this would be that like a knock on effect, since the first and most useless High-Rise falls first – as theirs is described as the pinkie – the others will slowly get chopped off too until the hand can barely function. This is why the High-Rise ends up in its animalistic nature; without and stability from the hand it changes itself into almost unconditioned primal instincts with people murder, debauchery and survival.

There is obviously more going on with each scene and each bit of dialogue along with each character representing something (I’m guessing a different aspect of society) but the film moves too quickly with its rapid editing and vagueness that it’s too frustratingly annoying to watch. If the film at least attempted to explain a bit more I probably would’ve given it a higher score.

5.