Tom Hiddleston (Magnolia Pictures)

“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog …” J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise has one of the great openings in literature. But what of its cinematic equivalent? Director Ben Wheatley (A Field in England) adapts Ballard’s dystopian vision for the screen in a reasonably faithful adaptation. It’s stylish and compelling, but naturally, it isn’t as good as the book.

Like the novel, the movie begins with a luxury high-rise already in disarray. Laing (Tom Hiddleston), wearing a bloodied dress shirt, carefully navigates stairways and doors blocked with debris, and lures a stray dog for what viewers unfamiliar with the source material may assume is companionship. Then you see the dog’s leg roasting on a spit.

Just three months earlier, the newly constructed Brutalist apartment building seemed to provide the finest in modern living, sometime in pre-Thatcher London in the ‘70s. Sleekly designed appliances are laid out among severe concrete walls and sharply dressed residents move in and out of this heavy home to classy sports cars parked in a massive lot. Laing, a physiology professor, is a bachelor who has just moved into one of the high-rise’s severe-looking apartments, and navigates an increasingly treacherous social pecking order that includes single mother Charlotte (Sienna Miller), documentary filmmaker Wilder (Luke Evans) and his very pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss). Lording over this concrete kingdom is Royal (Jeremy Irons), the architect-owner who also happens to own the unlucky dog we meet in the first scene.

The film’s impeccable art design suggests Jacques Tati’s Play Time and Traffic. On the surface, these are benign comedies, but they reflect Tati’s bleak vision of modern conveniences as something that inevitably dehumanizes society and leads to its breakdown.

There is nothing benign about High-Rise. To Ballard, the building is a doomed social experiment, its dense population living in a strict class system (upper classes living on the top floors and on down) that inevitably breaks down into a grown up Lord of the Flies.

Royal constructed the high-rise as one of five structures that fan out like fingers curling around a lake, but the structure’s mammoth volume is clearly phallic, and the men of the high-rise are ever on the make, sleeping with the building’s women, married or not, apparently at will. While Ballard saw this sexual energy as part of a general descent into anarchy, Wheatley, at least in part, revels in it. His actors’ period wardrobe suggests a harmless swinger’s club—that is, until the residents grow even more depraved.

Wheatley and his crew perfectly visualize Ballard’s world, and while the dry humor of Amy Jump’s script works for the most part, one soundtrack choice threatens to turn Ballard’s biting satire into camp. Portishead’s brooding cover of Abba’s “S.O.S.” is thematically apt, but is the kind of knowing pop culture reference that Ballard would have never stood for. High-Rise captures Ballard’s deathly dry tone better than previous adaptations (David Cronenberg’s Crash was more silly than disturbing). But the source sets such a high bar for prose, that this solid adaptation can’t help but fall short.

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High-Rise
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Written by Amy Jump
With Tom Hiddleston, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, Jeremy Irons
Rated R for violence, disturbing images, strong sexual content/graphic nudity, language and some drug use
119 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema