High-Rise (Ben Wheatley, 2015)

J.G. Ballard's near-future novels were largely preoccupied with the perverse behaviour of people in the modern urban environment, and as such are cold affairs, almost by necessity. Therefore the film adaptation of his 1975 work, High-Rise, involving the rapid and extreme disintegration of society in a hulking tower block, on one hand benefits from having a director who is associated with nightmare scenarios, whether past or future, but on the other enforces the nihilism of Ballard's source.
The film does achieve one thing brilliantly: this is the future as seen from 1975, and the period detail is something to savour. The casting, led by Tom Hiddleston's divorced doctor who moves into the bizarre environment, is also solid across the board. Nevertheless, it really needed its satirical aspects to work and that's difficult when it's such a stylised distortion of the state of the world, with too much relish shown for ultra-violence. It's not a million miles away in this sense from A Clockwork Orange.

6/10