“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

 And so, with one of the most calmly intriguing opening sentences in literature, begins J G Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, a dystopian/utopian dissection of life in an ultra-modern apartment block. Where the building’s new infantilising technology and amenities offers up a complete eradication of social order and the psychic liberation of its residents, allowing them to indulge their base sociopathic tendencies without restraint. Ballard stated that his sly brand of science fiction was based on peering into the ‘next five minutes’ imaging a future what was already breathing hungrily down our necks. Which is why 40 years after its publication, Ben Wheatley’s film comes across as far too little, far too late. Not only is it a politically and socially neutered dilution of the novel, Wheatley’s worst tendencies for BBC sitcom kitsch, push this in the direction of a monotonous League of Gentleman special populated with Abigail’s Party style grotesqueries.

When it was announced that Wheatley was to be taking on Ballard’s masterpiece, there was a collective sense that the tone of perpetual dread and unease he conjured up in Kill List was right to tackle the ecstatic chaos of Ballard’s prose. Instead we get the Sightseers version of Wheatley; curiously cosy yet cartoonishly violent.

In both the novel and the film, we begin at the end, before snapping back to Dr Robert Laing’s (Tom Hiddleston) first day in the high-rise as he takes residence in one of the thousand apartments contained within the brutalist monstrosity. His flat is on the 25^th floor, there are forty in total and his position near the middle denotes his aspirational middle class status. He is one of three central male characters, with the thuggish bottom dweller Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) and the buildings architect and top floor penthouse resident Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) completing the trio. Each one a representative symbol of their class status, Wilder is loutish and Royal strides about in a Safari jacket. This works in the book, where the thinly sketched characterisation is integral to its entomologically sterile prose; but this doesn’t translate to screen with Hiddleston especially coming off like a particularly bland meat puppet. This wouldn’t have been an issue if Wheatley had truly invested time and care in rendering the high rise (the books central concern) with the care and attention it deserves, yet the film offers no sense of scale, space or makes any effort to map out the relationship between spaces. All the amenities, the supermarket, the roof terrace, the elevator shafts and the swimming pool are present and correct, yet there’s no connective tissue between them, no sense of the building as a functioning organism. Just a battery of isolated sets, filled with the crude emblems and totems of 1970s décor: a pummeled bleeding slop of Pyrex, Chinzano and cocktail onions.

Ballard was meticulous and exact in depicting the high rises’ descent into chaos. A light goes out, an elevator breaks down, a dog is found drowned in the pool. Incremental shifts in tension and estrangement that overtime build to a complete dismantling of class structure, the family unit and moral integrity. What Wheatley does instead is pump the film with free associative montages that although visually and sonically arresting, destroy any sense of rising tension or any sense of temporal cause and effect. The brilliance of the novel was its ability to make the most heinous destructive acts seem entirely logical within the escalating violence of the high-rise, utilizing a monstrous ‘Heath Robinson’ style chain of cause and effect to show how life was spinning out of control, whist also making the shift entirely palatable to the reader. By removing elements from within the chain of causality castrates the film of any real power, the audience is no longer complicate and the effect is far less disturbing.

But it seems clear from the very beginning that Wheatley and Amy Jump, the films screenwriter, have very little interest in being disturbing or transgressive. There’s a small moment at the beginning of the film where Laing pins up a photo of his dead sister, except in the novel she isn’t dead, she lives in the high rise and eventually once conventional familial structure breaks down, incest is suggested. I can’t help but view that photo as an explicit statement of intent, a friendly pat on the shoulder, don’t worry this isn’t going to be THAT version of the book, here have Reese Shearsmith doing a silly voice instead.