J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel High-Rise (1975) takes place in a block of five apartment towers on the Thames River, the first-occupied of which, with 1,000 units and about 2,000 residents, gradually descends into barbarism. Ballard was writing at the tail end of England’s postwar boom in tower-block construction, when the practical drawbacks of such housing communities had become impossible to ignore. Forty years later, the book’s topical moment may have passed, but it still holds up as an urban Lord of the Flies, and given the enduring cult reputation of David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), adapted from another Ballard novel, you can see how someone might have bankrolled a modestly budgeted screen version of High-Rise. Unfortunately, “modestly budgeted” doesn’t cut it where High-Rise is concerned, because capturing Ballard’s vision onscreen would require hundreds of speaking roles and the art-direction resources of a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.
Also lost is Ballard’s portrayal of the community as an organism within the building space, an organism that gradually disintegrates into vicious tribalism. Countless speaking roles would have been needed to dramatize the tenants’ elevator wars, the epic vandalism of the common spaces, the endless electricity blackouts and air-conditioning breakdowns, the systemic targeting and ransacking of apartments, and the formation of little societies among neighboring floors, which eventually break down into smaller cells confined to single floors and, ultimately, solitary grubbing for food or sex. Like Cronenberg’s Crash, the movie offers lots of pervy, soft-core action—the horny Laing mates not only with Charlotte but with Wilder’s pregnant wife, Helen (Elisabeth Moss)—yet Jump omits much of the social detail about the little harems that form around the more forceful men as the law of the jungle prevails and the women are subjugated.
Directed by Ben Wheatley
