High Rise (2015)

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Movie
German title High rise
Original title High rise
Country of production United Kingdom
original language English
Publishing year 2015
length 112 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Ben Wheatley
script Amy Jump
production Jeremy Thomas
music Clint Mansell
camera Laurie Rose
occupation

High-Rise is a British science fiction film directed by Ben Wheatley and a film adaptation of the 1975 dystopian novel High-Rise by the British writer James Graham Ballard , which was published in German in 1982 under the title Der Block and 1992 under the title Hochhaus . The film premiered on September 13, 2015 at the Toronto International Film Festival and was released in German cinemas on June 30, 2016.

content

action

London in 1975. Robert Laing, a newly divorced, young and wealthy doctor, moves into a recently completed modernist high-rise designed by the architect Anthony Royal. The residents live here as an isolated community cut off from the rest of society. The building should enable a whole new level of luxury: It offers residents all the amenities of modern life, from the supermarket to the gym, and it is actually no longer necessary to leave the high-rise. One of his neighbors is the orthodontist Nathan Steele, and above him lives the attractive, single mother Charlotte Melville, whom he met while lying naked on his balcony in the sun.

The higher you live in the skyscraper, the higher the status of a person. Little by little, tensions arise between the residents and a dangerous social situation arises: unrest develops within the household community and among the social classes that have formed over time. Three layers emerge: the residents of the luxurious penthouses , such as the faded actress Jane Sheridan and the belligerent gynecologist Pangbourne, become the upper class, those of the middle floors become the middle class, and those on the lower floors become the lower classes. Families with offspring are also at the bottom of the building's social ranking and live accordingly close to the ground.

However, power outages and piles of rubbish soon exacerbated the conflicts within the community, and barricades were erected at several points in the building. During a party, the residents of the lower floors storm the swimming pool, which was previously occupied by the residents of the upper floors. The supermarket is ransacked and the house is raped. In this tense environment, Laing befriends the documentary filmmaker Richard Wilder, who only made it to the second floor and lives here with his pregnant wife Helen, and also makes the acquaintance of the building's architect, Anthony Royal, who works with his Ms. Anne lives upstairs, where a huge park is available to both of them, which even has space for a horse. Laing himself lives in the middle of the skyscraper, which puts him between the fronts because of a planned assassination attempt by Wilder on Royal, and the opportunist has to decide which side of this story he wants to be on.

Film analysis

Chris Hall from The Guardian recognizes in the film the areas of the human psyche represented by the three protagonists according to Sigmund Freud , united under one roof. Richard Wilder if it were the time , Dr. Robert Laing (whose name clearly refers to RD Laing , the author of The Divided Self ) symbolizes the ego , and the architect of the building, Anthony Royal, is the superego . Royal is a tragic figure and ultimately realizes the flaw in his creation. In psychoanalysis, representing the superego, it is the moral authority or conscience that has internalized the moral norms and values ​​of the cultural environment. Wilder as a documentary filmmaker with anarchist tendencies , who cheats even though his wife is heavily pregnant, symbolizes as Es, according to Freud, the unconscious and instinctual part of the individual, in particular the area of ​​sexual desire and aggressive impulses. Between above and below, between superego and id, torn back and forth, is Dr. Laing, who can only maintain a distant, friendly relationship with Royal because of his medical training, while he is impressed by Wilder because of his daring nature. As I, in Freud's model he is the entity that corresponds to the conscious thinking of everyday life and mediates “between the claims of the id, the superego and the social environment”. The ego has the goal of resolving psychological and social conflicts constructively and has its drives under control.

Wheatley sees Royal's attempt to enable as many people as possible to enjoy a comfortable life in his skyscraper as a well-intentioned but failed social experiment . The architect himself describes his project in history as a melting pot of transformation , but he has made too many misjudgments about how people will react to one another. In the novel, Royal is not the only one responsible for making the experiment go wrong. Ballard himself describes the building in the book as Pandora's box , which opens its thousand lids inwards, one after the other. For Sienna Miller, too, it is not the individual residents, but the skyscraper itself that drives the events: "The real star of the film is the building."

production

Literary template

The novel High-Rise by the British writer James Graham Ballard , published in 1975, served as a literary model for the film. Chris Hall from The Guardian is reminded of the high-rise described by Ballard of the Unité d'Habitation (French for residential unit) in Marseille , which there is colloquially known as the residential machine and was developed as a modern type of residential building by the architect Le Corbusier . The Montparnasse Tower in Paris also shows similarities, but especially the Balfron Tower in London, near which Ballard also located his skyscraper in the novel.

High-Rise is the last part of a tetralogy by Ballard after The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974) . The first sentence of the novel High-Rise says: "Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months." Translation: "Later, when he was sitting on his balcony and eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place in the huge apartment building over the past three months.") Hereby the novel anticipates some narrative elements that are addressed later in the film.

Production history

Ben Wheatley (right) at the 2015 Toronto Film Festival

The producer Jeremy Thomas , who had already brought an adaptation of a Ballard work to the screen in 1996 with Crash by David Cronenberg , was friends with the writer, who died in 2009, and planned to make another of his works after his death.

Staff and cast

In August 2013, ScreenDaily reported that Ben Wheatley was working on an adaptation of the book. His wife Amy Jump did the work on the script .

Tom Hiddleston's involvement in the film and taking on the lead role of Dr. Robert Laing became known in February 2014. Commenting on the cast, Wheatley said, "Tom has that kind of British matinée idol of the 1940s or 50s that we don't have anymore." In preparation for his role as a doctor, Hiddleston had watched a pathologist at work and was present during an autopsy .

In June 2014, actors Luke Evans and Elisabeth Moss , who play the Wilder couple in the film, joined the crew, and James Purefoy followed suit at the same time . Later Augustus Prew's engagement became known.

Filming and equipment

According to his own statements, the director had read something about the making of the film Trainspotting and that an old brewery was used for the shooting. Since Wheatley always wanted to shoot in an industrial location, because there were many different and interesting rooms available there, he started looking for it.

The Walled Garden at Bangor Castle : in the film, the roof garden by the architect Anthony Royal

Wheatley also looked at the Unite d'Habitation designed by Le Corbusier in Marseille. Thomas Page CNN calls, in addition to the already placed with the novel in conjunction real originals such as the Balfron Tower, a number of other, in the 1970 year incurred brutalist building said about the Wheatley to have been inspired by them. These include the Trellick Tower in London, which was completed in 1972 and looks very similar to the Balfron Tower, the Barbican Center in London, the Birmingham Central Library and the Red Road Flats in Balornock, Glasgow , where the first residents moved in 1971.

Filming began in Belfast , Northern Ireland in July 2014 and later largely took place at the Seaside Resort Bangor . Most of the filming there was in the Old Bangor Castle Leisure Center, which had been closed since 2012. Wheatley said he found a sports center, established in 1973, with a sports hall, an attached squash court, and a swimming pool in this building, which also had a large number of hallways and would have offered twice as much space as a film studio. Additional recordings were made at the Co-Op bank building and in the Walled Garden at Bangor Castle . In post-processing of the film material, CGI gave the impression that it was hundreds of meters high on the roof of the building.

Wheatley tried to use mood boards and collages to reproduce the aesthetics he wanted for the film. He worked for this with Mark Tildesley , who was responsible for the set of the film. To enable the camera to transition smoothly from one location to another, Tildesley developed a triangular concrete support pillar that could be seen in almost every film set. Some of the recordings were mirrored to make the figures appear a little more interesting. For this, the lettering and clocks shown in these scenes also had to be made the wrong way round and the hair of the actors had to be styled in the opposite direction. It was difficult to direct these scenes, Wheatley said.

Film music

The English musician and composer Clint Mansell , who received the World Soundtrack Award in 2007 for his work on The Fountain , created the score. The film's soundtrack was released on March 18, 2016 by Silva Screen Records and includes 12 songs. In addition, high-rise songs are played that are not included on the soundtrack, such as the 1975 song SOS and its cover version of Portishead , which was incorporated into the film twice. In December 2016, the soundtrack was included in the list of candidates (longlist) at the Academy Awards 2017 in the category Best Film Music , from which the members of the Academy determined the official nominations, but were not nominated

Title list of the soundtrack

  1. Critical Mass
  2. Silent Corridors
  3. The World Beyond the High-Rise
  4. The Vertical City
  5. The Circle of Women
  6. Built, Not for Man, But for Man's Absence
  7. Danger in the Streets of the Sky
  8. Somehow the High-Rise Played into the Hands of the Most Petty Impulse
  9. Cine-Camera Cinema
  10. A Royal Flying School
  11. The Evening's Entertainment
  12. Blood Garden

publication

The film premiered on September 13, 2015 at the Toronto International Film Festival and was released in cinemas in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2016 . In Germany, the film was originally due to be released on September 1, 2016, but the date was later brought forward to June 30, 2016. In addition, the film was shown in advance in various German cities as part of the Fantasy Filmfest Nights in April 2016.

reception

Age rating

The MPAA had given the film an R rating in the United States because of the violence it shows, the depicted drug use, disturbing images, sexual content and expressions, and some nude scenes , which discourages parents from allowing their children to see the film. According to the actor, the scene in which Hiddleston sunbathes and in which his bare bum can be seen was important to the director and the screenwriter because this scene also appeared in the original book. But he had no problem with that, says Hiddleston.

In Germany, where the film is FSK 16, the release certificate says: "The escalating, sometimes drastic, but never voyeuristic violence can overwhelm [...] children and adolescents under the age of 16." Older children, however, are offered stylized and satirical staging Keeping the film sufficient opportunity to distance yourself. The characters in the film would also not invite identification.

Reviews

The film was able to convince 62 percent of the Rotten Tomatoes critics (out of a total of 159 critics, as of August 11, 2016). The consensus there says: "'High-Rise' cannot really do justice to its classic source material, but still shows an energetic, well-played and thought-provoking take on socio-economic issues."

Tom Hiddleston at the premiere for the film

Felix Zwinzscher of Die Welt describes leading actor Hiddleston as Britain's new talent for darkly amusing excursions into the depths of our coexistence, but as the architect loses track as the film progresses, so does Wheatley. The stylishly choreographed 70s orgies staged by the director missed the plot after a while. Zwinzscher reminds us why some books are considered unfilmed and explains: “Visual metaphors lose their appeal more quickly and are not enough on their own to advance a story. The nuances are missing. Wheatley only celebrates chaos for the sake of chaos. "

David Kleingers from SPIEGEL ONLINE feels reminiscent of socio-apocalyptic cinema models from the 1960s and 1970s such as A Clockwork Orange , Themroc , If ... and Shivers . Wheatley, according to Kleingers, staged his view of the seventies in a similarly stylish and fresh way as Ang Lee in the adaptation of The Ice Storm from 1997. Together with the screenwriter Amy Jump, Wheatley successfully emphasized the still virulent themes of a 40-year-old novel. The economic and social desolation of Gray Britain of the seventies predicted in the book is continued in the film in the globally erected, depopulated speculation cathedrals made of glass and exposed concrete that dominate urban space today. Between good-humored nihilism and satirical cultural criticism , High-Rise describes a place, according to Kleingers, where society sheds its skin.

Peter Debruge of Variety , however, speaks of an often incoherent cinematic adaptation by Wheatley, the many elements of social criticism that JG Ballard practiced with his novel, not shown, and the smartest ideas of the book would have worked with a wrecking ball. What began as a self-contained allegory of the open class struggle will become a display of cultivated anarchy , which is expressed in orgies of sex and violence, but which would almost result in a total loss of film form. After the first half of the 2016 film year was over, the film was brought up by Debruge's colleagues Kristopher Tapley and Jenelle Riley as a possible candidate for an award in the category Best Production Design for the upcoming Academy Awards . They think that the setting of the film is its essential characteristic. Production designer Mark Tildesley and film set designer Paki Smith would have turned Ballard's world out of the book into an artistic feast for the eyes.

Awards

High-Rise was nominated for the Golden Seashell at the 2015 San Sebastián International Film Festival . In the run-up to the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival , Ben Wheatley was nominated for the Platform Prize . As part of the British Independent Film Awards 2015 were Tom Hiddleston as Best Actor and Luke Evans and Sienna Miller as a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Amy Jump received a nomination for Best Screenplay for her work on the film . At the 2017 London Critics' Circle Film Awards , High-Rise was nominated for Best British or Irish Film , and Mark Tildesley received a nomination for Best Equipment . For the election as part of the Three Empire Awards 2017 was the high-rise as Best British film included in the shortlist. At the 2016 International Film Music Critics Association Awards, Clint Mansell received a nomination for Best Music for a Motion Picture Drama . Mark Tildesley was nominated for Best Equipment at the Chlotrudis Awards 2017 .

Architectural inspirations

A selection of buildings that inspired writer James Graham Ballard and director Ben Wheatley in their work:

Web links

Commons : High-Rise  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for high-rise . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF; test number: 159931 / K). Template: FSK / maintenance / type not set and Par. 1 longer than 4 characters
  2. ↑ a b c Chris Hall: Why JG Ballard's High-Rise takes dystopian science fiction to a new level In: theguardian.com, October 3, 2015.
  3. ↑ Frank Arnold: Review of High-Rise In: epd Film, June 24, 2016.
  4. ↑ Kacper Piontkowski: 'Thoughts on Freud, of course', On the psychoanalytic aspect of selected texts by Franz Kafka , 2014.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Thomas Page: Retromania: Inside 'High-Rise', Ballard's Brutalist nightmare In: CNN, March 15, 2016.
  6. ↑ David Brussat: A high-rise schimflexicon In: architecturehereandthere.com, July 6, 2015.
  7. ↑ Sienna Miller and Tom Hiddleston in conversation with Chris Morrison: Tom Hiddleston interviewed on the set of High-Rise in Bangor In: irishnews.com, March 11, 2016.
  8. ↑ Tim Robey: High-Rise is 'the height of decadence' - review In: The Telegraph, March 17, 2016.
  9. ^ Mark Olsen: Tom Hiddleston moves into Ben Wheatley's dystopian 'High-Rise'; Luke Evans makes things chaotic In: LA Times Online, Sept. 11, 2015.
  10. ^ Andreas Wiseman: ScreenDaily, Ben Wheatley to direct JG Ballard's High Rise for RPC In: screendaily.com, August 29, 2013.
  11. ↑ Meredith Woerner: Tom Hiddleston will star in the movie adaptation of High Rise! In: io9.com, February 5, 2014.
  12. ↑ Mark Kermode: Ben Wheatley: 'Financing a film as crazy as this takes good casting' In: The Guardian, March 6, 2016.
  13. ↑ Etan Vlessing: TIFF: Tom Hiddleston Recounts Viewing an Autopsy to Prepare for 'High-Rise' Role In: The Hollywood Reporter, September 14, 2015.
  14. ^ Leo Barraclough: 'Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss Join Ben Wheatley's' High-Rise' In: Variety. Retrieved June 26, 2014.
  15. ↑ Oliver Lyttelton:The Hobbit 'Star Luke Evans Joins Tom Hiddleston In Ben Wheatley's' High Rise( Memento of the original from June 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / blogs.indiewire.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Indie Wire, June 13, 2014.
  16. ↑ George Wales: Ben Wheatley confirms Tom Hiddleston for High-Rise. In: gamesradar.com, February 5, 2014.
  17. ↑ Ben Wheatley's 'High-Rise' to film in Northern Ireland ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: northernirelandscreen.co.uk, April 30, 2014.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.northernirelandscreen.co.uk
  18. ↑ Rachel Martin: Hotel plan for Bangor leisure center used as High Rise movie set In: belfasttelegraph.co.uk, March 22, 2016.
  19. ↑ Sarah Scott: The Co Down filming locations for Hollywood blockbuster High Rise look incredible in the trailer In: belfastlive.co.uk, February 15, 2016.
  20. ↑ 'Clint Mansell Scoring Ben Wheatley's' High-Rise' In: Film Music Reporter. Retrieved April 2, 2015.
  21. ^ High-Rise (2016) In: soundtrack.net. Retrieved March 30, 2016.
  22. ^ High-Rise (2016) In: soundtrack-movie.com. Retrieved February 21, 2016.
  23. ^ Mark Olsen: Tom Hiddleston moves into Ben Wheatley's dystopian 'High-Rise'; Luke Evans makes things chaotic In: LA Times Online, Sept. 11, 2015.
  24. ↑ 145 Original Scores In 2016 Oscar Race In: oscars.org, December 13, 2016.
  25. ↑ Tobias Mayer: Strom aus, Anarchy: New trailer for the sci-fi thriller 'High-Rise' with Tom Hiddleston In: filmstarts.de, January 17, 2016.
  26. ↑ Program of the Fantasy Filmfest Nights 2016 In: fantasyfilmfest.com. Accessed December 28, 2019 (PDF; 2.7 MB)
  27. ^ High-Rise In: comingsoon.net. Retrieved June 12, 2016.
  28. ↑ Marc Malkin: Tom Hiddleston Explains 'Very Important' Nude Scene in High-Rise In: eonline.com, April 23, 2016.
  29. ↑ Reason for approval for High-Rise In: Voluntary Self-Control of the Film Industry. Retrieved June 30, 2016.
  30. ↑ High-Rise : In Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved August 11, 2016.
  31. ↑ Felix Zwinzscher: Is that still science fiction or already Brexit? In: Die Welt, June 30, 2016.
  32. ↑ David Kleingers: 'High-Rise' with Tom Hiddleston: Sex, violence and a can of dog food In: SPIEGEL ONLINE, June 29, 2016.
  33. ↑ Peter Debruge: Toronto Film Review: 'High-Rise' In: Variety, September 14, 2015.
  34. ↑ Kristopher Tapley and Jenelle Riley: 22 Deserving Oscar Contenders From the First Half of 2016 In: Variety, June 24, 2016.
  35. ↑ Platform Line-Up Just Announced ( Memento of the original from January 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: tiff.net, August 13, 2015.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / tiff.net
  36. ↑ Nominations (2015) In: bifa.film. Retrieved January 3, 2016.
  37. ↑ Nancy Tartaglione: 'Moonlight', 'Love & Friendship' Lead London Critics' Circle Nominations In: deadline.com, December 20, 2016.
  38. ↑ James Dyer: Vote For The 2017 Three Empire Awards: Final Round In: empireonline.com, February 7, 2017.
  39. ↑ IFMCA Award Nominations 2016 In: filmmusiccritics.org, February 9, 2017.