An long-overdue adaptation of one of JG Ballard's better-known novels, the film presents the collapse of an ecosystem represented by the denizens of a massive, somewhat self-sufficient apartment building. Failure of the building's infrastructure precipitates a pitched battle between the classes inside its brutalist walls.
It's taken about 30 years to bring an adaptation to completion. Over the years, many have been tagged to do it and the ideas of the novel have been transplanted to other works, but the prize goes to Ben Wheatley for finally bringing it to the screen.
I've enjoyed Wheatley's previous films at TIFF, notably "Kill List" and "A Field in England", and thought he would be prepared to go in some interesting directions with this. I haven't read the novel, so I came to it reasonably fresh.
The design and music are very much in keeping with the 1970's of the novel (it was published in 1975). Brutalist architecture actually predates this period, but persisted into that time.
Each class is represented, with Luke Evans as a filmmaker who precipitates some of the chaos on the upper floors, Tom Hiddleston as a doctor who embraces it and Jeremy Irons as the Architect who designed the complex and in doing so, sowed the seeds of his own destruction.
It's a big, loud and chaotic dog's breakfast of a film whose ideas never really come together in a satisfying package. If there is a fault, it's with the screenplay, which doesn't get a handle on the story or where to take it.
Disappointing.
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