From Drew Dietsch
| Published
“… Sometimes it was difficult for him to believe that they lived in a future that had already taken place and was now exhausted.” – JG Ballard
The future is something that we constantly think of as humans. Not in a funky “What is there for dinner tonight?” Away. I’m talking about the future. Our dreams and nightmares about where civilization, society, technology and humanity all go.
And at the moment I have to say that the future feels bleak. One of the biggest factors in this terrible feeling that so many people have about the future has a growing and never obvious separation between the rich and the rest of us.
It is difficult to see not only a few people at the top, which makes all of us miserable.
Obviously, this is not a problem that has appeared overnight and many great works of art have explored the warfare history of the classes.
But there is a story that has eaten me on me since my 2016 declication film. A film that has only become more powerful and terrifying every year. A brutal, dark, absurd and uncomfortable science fiction story that makes the perfect combination with the apparent dystopia of our world.
And Loki is in there! Naked!
High -rise building
That is High -rise buildingA film everywhere will tell that they came out in 2015, but these are all film festival dates that don’t count. The broad publication was 2016. It is a film 2016. IMDB and Wikipedia can be bent.
High -rise buildingThe film 2016 is based on JG Ballard’s 1975 novel. Most of Ballard was known to write post -apocalyptic and dystopic fiction, which dealt with ideas about the social decay and the base of humans.
In High -rise buildingThe story is about Robert Laing, a new tenant in a modern apartment complex that offers everything you have to exist in today’s life. For example, there is a whole floor of the building that is a supermarket, so that the residents don’t even have to leave to do their purchases.
It becomes clear that the building is strongly split through the class and this is deliberately maintained by the different soils, with the exorbitant shall downhael the higher floors and the poorer tenants that occupy the apartments.
Things fall apart
In the course of history, the residents of the building begin with power outages when they become more and more dependent on the building for their daily life. People stop going to their workplaces, parents stop sending children to school, and there seems to be an entire civilization that forms within the high -rise building, which aims at the basic trips of mankind.
All of this is created with the very clear metaphor of the high -rise itself. While this social apocalypse escalates, the decadents continue to live on the higher floors and even attack the lower floors for supplies and attack poor tenants in the dark in the failures.
When it came to transforming Ballard’s novel into a film, the writer Amy jumped and director Ben Wheatley made a very conscious and integral choice in adaptation. Ballard’s novel does not give a final year for the events that take place, but it should be seen as part of his warning story as a very close future.
The future already happened
The High -rise building The film sets history in 1975, in the same year in which the novel was published. First of all, the reasons for this seem to be an opportunity to treat yourself to some nostalgic styles such as the fashion of the era or the entire design aesthetics.
But the line of Ballard’s novel, which finds its way into the Voice -over the film very early High -rise building as a film.
By determining the film in the 1970s and presenting its history as an example of the social decline, Creative thesis is argued for Ballard’s creative thesis in this brilliant line. The future that has been promised is the one you are experiencing and it has already been drained. We will come back to it.
It should be said that although High -rise building Is one of my favorite film from me, I realize that it will not be a film, for … well, probably most people. This is a film in which a dog is killed and eaten in the first two minutes, and then another dog is murdered by drowning. If I have learned anything from my decades of watching, writing and speaking about films, the audience really doesn’t like it when puppies die in their film.
It only gets worse
And the rest of the film won’t be much happier. Tom Hiddleston Plays Robert Laing and his observations about the building and its people lead to a character that many people will probably not like. Laing is a cold man looking for a real human connection, but he also plays a dark prank on a Boorish -rich child from the building that leads to a terrible suicide.
Laing’s journey and philosophy becomes very passive when the building descends into chaos and anarchy. It is the type of character that probably works better in written form, but I think High -rise building.
This is also a film with a very niche sense of humor. As I mentioned already, all this “bit of a dog” comes at the beginning of Ballard’s first and foremost, and it should be a bit of him dark comedy. A similar example is when Laing sets dinner with the architect of the building Anthony Royal (played by Jeremy Irons), who asks Laing about his thoughts about the building when someone screams in the background.
If it is viewed from this perspective, there is a lot of pitch -black absurdity in which I love High -rise buildingIn particular, Luke Evans as Richard Wilder, one of the tenants of the building, who, as his name tells them, succumbs to his wildest impulses and his behavior. Evans is exclusively, hurls spit and makes the entire goblin mode. It is ridiculous and equally tragic.
But, High -rise building is not factual in his presentation. The score of Clint Mansell is adequately psychotic and changes from Regal Bombast to a child’s mood, and is not the kind of musical experience that the audience causes to feel comfortable.
The overview of the film is exceptionally polished, but the dreamy processing will not click the mainstream audience. I love it because it emphasizes the idyllic dreams of progress and comfort that are slowly consumed by the inherent nightmares of the human condition.
And it means that we receive a sequence on a portihead cover from Abbas “SOS”, which is one of the best things of the past decade.
I could talk about it High -rise building For hours, but one of the reasons why I wanted to make a video about it is the hope that at least one person will discover High -rise building Because you saw this video. So I don’t want to choose everything in the film.
But the other reason why I felt High -rise building is deservedly emphasized because I see a lot of people who start to experience what to experience, what High -rise building spoke about it in 2016.
The rich and the rest of us
It feels like we are in the middle of a great cultural consciousness for the strong separation between the Haves and Have-Nots. As many of us recognize that the future we were sold would never be possible. It was someone dream that had already happened and is now exhausted.
At the end of High -rise buildingLaing found luck. It is in realizing that the social construct created by the post -apocalyptic society of the high -rise is probably the best reflection of humanity in all its animal nature. And he is waiting for the other high -rise nearby to find the same descent into barbaric bliss.
It is not an optimistic ending, it is a dark strange, but one in which I can’t help back to the search for the higher class to feel the same turbulence that the rest of us experiences.
High -rise building is quite explicitly in his metaphorical conclusion of capitalist society, especially in the end with a child character that hears a program by Margaret Thatcher, and I think that many more people are now with the mentality of film about the inherent dissonance of capitalism with human nature arrive.
I hope the world does not reflect High -rise building But I broke my dog characteristics in all cases.
