Year: 2016 Director: Ben Wheatley
No-one going to do this? Oh, OK then. I watched this on Easter Sunday afternoon, in the polite company of a middle class audience in the local arthouse cinema, who seemed completely unmoved, positively or negatively, by the demented, head-spinning, blackly comic film they were watching. Very Ballardian.
The film is set in a 1970s tower block, newly built as a Utopian social project by its resident architect, which acts as a class metaphor: upper middle classes on the top floors and the lower reaches of the middle classes at the bottom. Failing building services and increasing resentment of bottom for top (and vice versa), coupled with the hermetic nature of the building – shopping and leisure facilities built in – lead to the complete disintegration of society and a feral (un)civil war breaks out. Dog eating, orgies and death-by-Bafta ensue as the polite mask is ripped off and used to beat people over the head.
The general chaos on screen means that a traditional narrative drive of action>consequence just isn’t there, which has annoyed many people, but it’s handsomely filmed, properly funny in places, and the fragments do hang together if you » Continue Reading.
