The second thing is that the building wins.

The first is that the two best-looking people in the film - the suddenly omnipresent actor Tom Hiddleston playing our dog-eating young doctor, and Sienna Miller as a glamorous single mother whose wayward elbows send champagne bottles flying off balcony railings - wind up together in the end, gaunt and grimy but still beautiful, in the sort of concession to genetics that fiction can ignore and around which Hollywood box office is built. This is a book whose first sentence famously jumps right to the macabre end of the story, after the residents of a swish, brand-new 40-story tower just outside London have turned on one another and on the building - and as the protagonist sits on his terrace eating his neighbor’s dog.Īnd so I feel no guilt in telling you a couple of things about the newly released movie version of the story, directed by Ben Wheatley. Ballard’s 1975 novel, there’s no such thing. Spoiler alert? When it comes to discussing “High-Rise,” J.G.

High rise by jg ballard