If Tom Hiddleston, Ben Wheatley and J.G. Ballard sound like a fascinatingly peppery combination of acting, direction and source material, High-Rise won’t disappoint. The joltingly dystopian world the three have combined to create is showcased in a new trailer for the film you can watch below.
A passion project Sexy Beast producer Jeremy Thomas has been trying to get off the ground for a decade ([he had Nicolas Roeg interested at one point](
http://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/jeremy-thomas-british-cinema/)), the end product looks likely to pack a punch. Set in 1975, Hiddleston plays Dr. Robert Laing, a young physician who moves into what the marketing pitch has promised will be the ultimate in utopian living. A power cut and the near-total breakdown of social order later, and he’s sitting on his balcony eating his neighbour’s dog. Ballard’s vinegary social comment is intact, as is Wheatley’s gift for creating off-centre worlds filled with memorable characters and sharply observed humour.
"Why Ben Wheatley?” asks Thomas, rhetorically. "There’s many crossroads and junction points in every work of life, but especially in films, and I’d got stuck at a junction with this film when I got a message from my son telling me Ben Wheatley loved the book. My producer brain thinks: ‘What can this film be? With Ben directing and (producer) Amy Jump writing the script? That’d be good. I like it, I want to see it. We’re going to do it.’”
They’ve done it, with some help from Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans and Elisabeth Moss. You can see it in your local cinema from March 18.