J.G. Ballard has odd luck as a novelist when it comes to adapting his movies to the screen; more often than not, they wind up more notorious than popular. Just ask anybody who’s seen Crash or Empire of the Sun. And High-Rise seems out to continue the trend with this first teaser.
From cult horror director Ben Wheatley, who you really need to be familiar with if you’re not already, High-Rise follows an architect of an ’80s tower community as he builds his dream tower and fills it with the upper classes on top and the lower classes on the bottom. This being a J.G. Ballard novel, the high rise is quickly cut off from the outside world and a class war breaks out over the limited resources of the tower while everybody goes completely insane.
Hey, we didn’t say it was subtle. While this probably won’t be this year’s Snowpiercer, it does have an amusingly dry sense of humor, and Wheatley looks to have spot-on nailed the ugliness of ’80s architecture and fashion. Now to see whether he goes quite as far as Ballard did in the book: We’ll find out in 2016, when Magnet Releasing rolls out the movie.
(Via The Playlist)
