High-Rise (2015)

Tom Hiddleston plays a brain surgeon who moves into a new high-rise tower, one that seems meant to be a little community. It has pools, gyms, squash courts, supermarkets, probably some other stuff. The architect behind it (played by Jeremy Irons) has four more towers planned, all set around a lake so that the whole thing looks like a hand reaching towards the sky. He also thinks this is going to be like some petri dish to engineer changes to society.

Perhaps he should have spent more time focused on the wiring, because the building is a shoddy piece of crap. As the power goes off and on, as people ignore the rules about what you can and can't put down the trash chute, as the lower income families are turned away from the pool because they're too noisy for the wealthier residents, things fall to pieces. The different floors start turning into their own societies, having parties or orgies. The folks on top pass around wild plans to seize the lower floors by turning them against each other, decrying the lower folks actions while abducting pregnant women, while walking around in gaudy tracksuits like they escaped from the Fraction/Aja Hawkeye series.

The building is like a microcosm for the world. It doesn't show a way to do better, simply plays out the reality of the situation in miniature. No one from outside the high-rise ever shows up to help restore power, sanitation, or order, just like nobody's coming to Earth to save us from our own stupidity.

Hiddleston's character drifts through the chaos. Everyone seems to be interested in him, mostly because of what they decide they see. That he, 'hides in plain sight,' that he's a social climber, that he's the one to watch out for, because he keeps it all locked up inside. It's hard to know how much of that is accurate. People seem to want to talk to him, want him to attend their parties, but he's rarely articulate or funny. A kind of pleasantly bland and polite canvas people for people to project onto.

He attends a party Irons' throws because he was invited, but no one told him they were dressing up like visiting Louis the 14th, so he stands there awkwardly until the chief goon chucks him out. He tries to act parental or wise to the son of a woman he occasionally fucks, but that falls flat. The kid has a much better idea of who he is and what's going on than Hiddleston's character. He's caught up in his own mind, possibly related to a dead sister, exacerbated when he tricked a coworker into thinking he had an inoperable tumor and the guy did a Peter Pan off the 30th floor of the high-rise, that he seems unable to process. Just retreating further into some mania of his own that has him beating a man senseless over the last bucket of paint in the supermarket.

Irons' character is just as disconnected from reality, but in the same way as John Hammond in Jurassic Park. So caught up in what he thinks his grand design will bring about, he barely notices the descent into chaos until he walks into the middle of a party in his apartment and realizes he has no idea where his wife is. To the end, he's convinced that he'll get everything right the next time, that he understands the kinks that need ironing out.

I couldn't get invested in the movie. Maybe because Hiddleston feels so much a passive observer, and a lot of the characters (especially the guys, who all various shades of big imbeciles with '70s facial hair) blurred together. Or because it spends so much time charting the breakdown in circumstances. I was waiting for him, or the film in general, to do something. Advance all this towards something beyond people being self-interested shits, or get to the inevitable conclusion of people being self-interested shits. Whichever.