Spoilers Below

Think about some of your favorite movies. You can probably break them into 2 major categories: movies you love because how they make you feel, and movies you love because of how they make you think. I love The Hangover but also love Crash. The greatest movies do both by making you think and laugh, while teaching you something about the world or society that is terrifying and amplifying it. The best example that I can think of is Fight Club. People either love it or don't care about it because they don't like movies that make them think about themselves and the way their society lives. High Rise is that rare movie some of your friends won't get but you will watch 100 times if you love it.

If Fight Club is a slow methodical process that is determined to force anarchy on the world, High-Rise shows how fragile our social structures are and how quickly they could devolve into chaos. It goes from idyllic hyper-capitalism to hunter-gather survivalism over the course of 3 months. Where Fight Club is a picture of an ugly world today, High-Rise is a painting of a possible past in 70's English-style; impressionism meets post-modernism. Fight Club wants the setting to be the background, whereas High-Rise is living art for art's sake. Much of the story happens behind the main characters and around the diolauge. If you could imagine trying to preform a Shakespearean play in the midst of an orgy while drunk then you have a good sense of how the movie plays out.

It starts with our main character Dr. Robert Laing, physiologist, dirty and unkempt, filling out a payment for a post due bill, and throwing it off his balcony. It then moves promptly to him roasting a dog on spit with a cigarette in his mouth. Everything else is a flashback starting 3 months earlier when he moved into the building. Much like Edward Norton, aka Tyler Durden, in Fight Club, Dr. Laing is both the narrator and the protagonist. He moves through and between both the lower and upper classes of the High-Rise, which is stratified literally by what floor you live on in an new luxury apartment complex in London. Both groups like to throw extravagant parties with costumes and cocktails every night, and only leave the building to work since the Market, Gym, and Spa/Pool are all within the High-Rise Complex.

No matter what goes wrong in the high rise there is only one objective the tenants strive toward: throwing a bigger and better party. When the power is gone, when the trash chutes are clogged, or even if the water stops working the only objective is to party more. It gets to a point where it iss Lord of the Flies in a High-Rise , where those at the bottom compete for the resources to survive, while those at the top try to avoid getting killed while still throwing parties for their guests.

The spoiler is there are no happy endings. It ends with no closure, just a downward spiral into debauchery. It's a "Stop to Smell the Roses" movie, if you are waiting for it to get somewhere then you are not experiencing the art. It is an immensely deep and winding story of our own human condition. Watch with caution and use subtitles (the English accents can make it hard to hear and understand every word and turn of phrase). High-Rise comes out in theaters May 13th.