Review: HIGH RISE

Laing, a young neurosurgeon, moves into a new high-rise development, on a floor around the middle. At the bottom are the least affluent tenants and the penthouse on the fortieth features the landscaped garden (with horse) of the architect Royal. We are waiting for something to spark a revolution and are not surprised when it happens but surprise is not on offer here, anger is.

J.G. Ballard's troubling mid-70s dystopia of a social microcosm on every corner was a slap in the face of a post-war Britain whose contrary pull of a concrete band-aid utopianism and an entitled class in siege mode. Ben Wheatley keeps it 70s without falling prey to fulsome nostalgia. While we get a couple of versions of an ABBA song the commissioned score fends off what might have been a jukebox of Sweet and T-Rex or the Glitter Band (thank god!). The temporal setting is a nod to the source not a drawcard for the boomers who remember.  But it's also the time of a Margaret Thatcher on the rise and the gestation of a nightmarish push for a new lassez faire hell. That's what we get here.

So, as we start with a pleasant mid-level round of parties, drinking and sex and see the rarified snobbery of the upper floors we know it ain't gonna last. The kids barred from the pool while an upper crust nong has a private function which leads to an invasion led by malcontent in chief, Wilder. And then the power fails on the lower floors (and references to cake and some poignant checkout-chick French phrases). The barriers burst and it's orgies for all. The commune lasts until it gets boring and then the savagery takes over from below and above.

If Wheatley lingers on that last phase too long for some folk it should be remembered that this chaotic stage might well be made of sensational events but as a whole can sicken a witness through surfeit. It feels oppressive because it's meant to and if there's a film director working today who knows the power of a finely tuned excess it's Wheatley. There really was a point to the repetitive steps in Sightseers and the off-putting genre hopping of Kill List. Even in the open of A Field in England we could feel breathless and caged. Wheatley's films don't look much like each other but boy are they heavy lifting when they need to be.

A character describes Laing's apparent middle class complacency as hiding in plain sight and if anything might describe the visual heft of this film it is that phrase. The towers seen against the sky look like predators on the lookout. The beauty of the new building seems to carry the look of building rot in its texture. The fresh primary coloured walls and furniture on the lower floors assume the smell of the toddlers screaming around them and the sense of sweating human waste seems inescapable. This really is a Ben Wheatley film.

The cast never disappoints with an ensemble of the best the UK has to offer. Tom Hiddleston might seem to coast along in his placid bearing but his journey is one from hedonistic laxity to a controlled mania. Jeremy Irons dispenses with the creamy charm to remind us why David Cronenberg cast him three times (counting Dead Ringers as two) as Royal whose clueless anger reminds us of Louis XVI and whose white round collared smock recalls Nicholas II. Luke Evans shines in the range contest as Wilder, going believably from rogue to freedom fighter to perfect gentleman without a contradiction.

I forgot to mention the other sourced music. High Rise is framed by two points of irony. The first and most conventional is the bright and glorious 4th Brandenburg Concerto playing over the opening scenes of devastation. And then we end with a kid of art brut irony  as the Fall's Industrial Estate clanks and whinges over the animated perfect soap bubble of the end credits. Strange thing to say about such a piece but with this kind of hospitality we really are in caring hands.

Review: A FIELD IN ENGLAND: 1648 A Place Oddity

England, an England so distantly archaic that it must be shown in deep monochrome. A ragtag group of deserters from the Civil War find each other and head to a promised alehouse across a field and through the trees over there. Once in cups they will decide on how to proceed. Desertion carries the death penalty. Deserters must have a story. But before they can cross the field to find the alehouse they stop for a free stew up of the local mushrooms.

As this happens we hear their talk, learn a little of them, where they're from and how they've come to be there. The loyalty of each, roundhead or cavalier, has long been abandoned but there is a disparity among them about personal belief. The journeyman astrologer/alchemist Whitehead still clings (in a protest-too-much manner) to his Christianity. There are two rugged soldiers, one driven by the war to a kind of earthy nihilism and the other whose military bearing makes his desertion less explicable. And there is a clownish soldier who might have only deserted because he thought he was dead (you have to see it to get that one).

In reading up on the local responses to this film I was introduced to the term am-dram, amateur dramatics, which was used by the frostier reviews to describe the opening scenes of this film. I can't see it myself. The stilted dialogue and mix of accents which vary from geezer Cockney to Norn Irn might feel a tad stagey but the dialogue itself and its pepper of anachronisms served to uproot the historical drama pageant of the piece and declare its own terms. This film has a setting rather than a period. It is an ancien regime falling bloodily apart, belief and class structure are being splattered on the green and pleasant land and draining into the soil below. The setting is Chaos and there are few times more symbolic of chaos than civil war.

Into this destabilised scene enters the necromancer O'Neill. He is a rougue fellow black arts journeyman bound to the same master as Whitehead but escaped the master's influence earlier. Whitehead was charged with his pursuit and capture. O'Neill, however, enters with magisterial presence, aided immediately by the more servile soldier as though it was preplanned. From this point A Field in England takes its series of shapes.

O'Neill explains to Whitehead that they are there to uncover a treasure the location of which will require Whitehead's skills of divination. The divination begins with one of the film's tableaus which shows the group gathered outside O'Neill's tent variously in what looks like worship or phallic military authority (I'm really not being that figurative here, it's pretty hard edged) as Whitehead's agonised, terrified screams tear out from the tent. It's a mix of religious revelation and birth pain. He emerges from the tent in slow motion trailing a thick umbilical rope, walking like a marionette with his arms lifted but hanging loose, a demonic grin stretching his face. The music swells with an aching majesty. Because of the slow motion the others seem to remain in the tableau poses in worshipful awe of this vision they are powerless to explain.

If by this stage you are still searching for plot and dissatisfied with the idea that the structure of the treasure hunt is there as a frame for the expression and exploration of a deal of other things then this film is not for you. I've mentioned the tableaus a few times now without saying anything about them so I'll do that now as it supports what I've just stated. There are sequences in this film in which the characters are posed against their background. They are not freezframes, the actors are moving as little as they would if posing for a group photograph but their gestures and postures are deliberate.

Why is this so? There is neither time travelling photographer nor wood cut artist present. These displays (there are several) are for the audience and mark a point at which the film itself steps out of its flow to forge a statement. Contrast this with the use of tableau in a Peter Greenaway film wherein a gathering like a dinner scene will be so presented (many even clearly framed by the set's architecture). No one in a Greenaway tableau is aware that they are in one. The ones in A Field in England are carefully placed over the film, illustrations of its business rather than active parts of it. (Can you tell I'm really avoiding use of the prefix "meta" here?) As with the mix 'n' match dialogue we are being invited to ponder what we are seeing. While we might struggle with some of this, by the time we are assaulted with the sequence of hallucination (strobing, mirroring, warping and pretty much anything else Wheatley could throw at the screen) we should have some idea of where we have come from in the film.

There are moments in the dialogue towards the end that would sound trite in other settings but it would be a mistake to dismiss them as the apocalyptic, rank and stinky context in which they appear supports them with a solid foundation. It might defy the principles of good building but it does form a building.

I like going to a multiplex and diving into a big high tech actioner where everything falls into place as expected and tastes as reliable as the ice cream in a choc top. I love, however, sitting in front of something that I might only understand well after I have seen it, that I can neither predict nor control. This can be upsetting, haunting, or meaningless or boring but I still prefer not knowing. The removal of control from the audience is the essence of great horror but while A Field in England alludes to some genre pieces (there are a swathe of films it might evoke for you like Dead Man or Witchfinder General) it's business is to creep us rather than confront us into thinking. There is a lot here to think about.

So, whether psychedelic Western out of water, history pageant for Beckett fans, centuries-early prequels for Wheatley's Kill List or Sightseers, A Field in England ably progresses the work of a filmmaker whose every new work defies the expectations of the previous ones. Mention must be made of the aptness of the cast, particularly Reece Shearsmith (deeper and more complex than any of his creations in League of Gentlemen) and Michael Smiley (with an even more unsettling power than he brought to Gal in Kill List). The film also includes the funniest dying monologue outside of anything in Monty Python.

Terry Gilliam wanted to put on the poster of his troubling Tideland "It's great ... the second time." That could be the logline of Ben Wheatley's entire career. May he so continue.

Review: SIGHTSEERS

Tina lives with a mother who keeps her subdued with guilt. "You're not a friend," she says to Tina, "you're a relative." Tina at thirty-five is bound to this (made extra guilty by facilitating the accidental death of their terrier, Poppy) and her life looks as numbingly drab as a British kitchen sink  film. Into this stagnation rides Chris, not a knight in shining armour but a ginger with interests in pencils and trams. He is about to whisk Tina away on the holiday of a lifetime.

This goes well until they accidentally kill a fatheaded arrogant fellow tourist with their caravan. It's manslaughter not murder but it sends them into a sexual frenzy, incidentally enjoyed by the gang of roadworkers they've parked beside. One by one as opportunities emerge from England's green and pleasant mire the pair learn love and the art of spontaneous murder.

The central pair are played by Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, UK tv comedy veterans who also co-wrote the screenplay. The director's chair was filled by Ben Wheatley whose arresting genre-jumping Kill List has to be seen twice to get right.

This is film has been marketed, however subhorizontally, as Mike Leigh doing Natural Born Killers. That's not a bad start but something happens in this piece that Mike Leigh would never do in the face of temptation and Oliver Stone would never even think of: the couple's violence is driven entirely by the fury of their punishing inferiority. These are people who find the personal power to act beyond the supermarket clothes hues of their smothering lives but when they do it is in futile acts of rage. But this is not the rage of drunken yobbos or soccer hooligans but the infernal seething resentment of the middling.

Chris cannot create a humorous shell around the sniffiness of the middle class campers, even after he aggressively raced them for the better camping spot and spitefully broke a plate in their vintage minimalist caravan. He can only plan vengeance. Tina, similarly, cannot let the fun of a bridal party slide as good fun. These are people impossible to identify with and the sin of this lies in the fact of the film's nationality: a UK film that dares to hate its proletarian central figures. This is pretty much the reverse of the carboard middle class villains that mar whatever is salvageable from Mike Leigh's world of the blameless dispossessed. And there is none of the dodgy glamour of Natural Born Killers, either. When Chris and Tina kill they just kill and it is extremely ugly. This film hates its central characters and doesn't mind if you hate them, too.

So what's the point? A pair of leads you can't join in with doing things that a little comedy might cleanse. I don't know beyond the simple desire to shine a torch into the face of subjugated inferiority and look upon the mania of its constant resentment. Basil Fawlty works because his anger always backfires. But Fawlty Towers is a comedy, self-avowed and fulfilled. Sightseers has erroneously been depicted as a knockabout black laugh but there is too much hatred from the creative team even to claim the kind of offputting humour that Chris Morris or Julia Davis trade in.

At the same time I felt there was nothing try-hard about it and given the elements listed above there probably should have been. So why is this going in my top ten for the year? Because I loved it and I don't know why.

PS - this was a MIFF pick from this year's missed festival. I was picking pretty danged well.