High-Rise

High-Rise (2015) is Ben Wheatley's bleak drama from the J.G. Ballard novel, and you can watch it online on iFILM. A forty-storey 1970s tower with its own pool, supermarket and school, where stepping outside feels almost pointless. The perfect building, slowly losing its mind.

Doctor Robert Laing moves into a new flat and learns the social map: poorer families crowd the lower floors, the architect who designed it all, Anthony Royal, presides at the top, and a restless middle churns somewhere between, led by TV man Richard Wilder. First the power flickers, then the rules dissolve. Residents stop leaving, split into warring floors, and throw parties that curdle into riots. Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller and Luke Evans guide the descent into savagery with cold irony.

Wheatley shoots this class satire like a fever dream: retro production design, an ABBA song reworked for string quartet, mounting chaos in place of conventional plot. The film is deliberately uncomfortable and splits audiences down the middle, a brilliant allegory of class to some, an overly stylish mess to others. The slide down the floors starts in the opening frame. Stream High-Rise (2015) online on iFILM.