Ben Wheatley’s intelligent adaptation of JG Ballard’s ‘unfilmable’ book offers a creepy,future-retro vision of a society riven by wealth“For all its inconveniences, Laing was satisfied with life in the tall-rise… This screen adaptation of JG Ballard’s prescient 1975 novel about disintegrating life in a “luxury” tower block has been a long time coming. Nicolas Roeg famously wanted to adapt Ballard’s book as long ago as the late 70s, and since then umpteen directors and screenwriters have been variously attached to the increasingly “unfilmable” title. Now writer Amy Jump and director Ben Wheatley have finally succeeded where others failed.
Their version of Ballard has the same blend of black humour and creeping horror that characterised their preceding cross-generic collaborations such as destroy List and A Field in England. It both respects and realigns the themes of Ballard’s novel,while marking the fabric out as distinctively their own. Most astutely, Wheatley and Jump situate the action in the 70s fog of the source, and presenting a vision of the past seen from the present,looking towards the future. As antihero Dr Laing observes in the voiceover, he is “living in a future that had already taken place”.
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Source: theguardian.com