Well, here's a nice surprise just added to this year's Nashville Film Festival Special Presentations lineup! High-Rise sounds like exactly the kind of festival entry we love: It features a great cast — Tom Hiddleston (whose star turn as Hank Williams in I Saw the Light opens this weekend at Green Hills), Jeremy Irons, Elisabeth Moss, Sienna Miller, James Purefoy — working love-it-or-hate-it material that's bound to polarize audiences. In this case, it's an adaptation of J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel about a luxury skyscraper that descends (ascends?) into literal class warfare:
London, 1975. Robert Laing is a young doctor seduced by the lifestyle in a high-rise, an isolated community, cut off from the rest of society in their luxury tower block, and its creator, the architect Anthony Royal. Taking up residence on the twenty-fifth floor, Laing discovers a world of complex loyalties, and also strikes up a relationship with Royal's devoted aide Charlotte. After Laing befriends Richard Wilder, a documentary filmmaker relegated to the second floor who is determined to document the class injustices inherent in the high-rise, a dangerous social situation develops and the high-rise eventually fragments into violent tribes.
Producer Jeremy Thomas knows this terrain well: He was executive producer on David Cronenberg's still-transgressive 1996 adaptation of Ballard's novel Crash. Also exciting: The director is cult-favorite-in-the-making Ben Wheatley (A Field in England), whose beyond-black comedy Sightseers disturbed a lot of folks at NaFF '13. Can't wait to see the movie we've heard described as "a vertical Snowpiercer."
