Tom Hiddleston Invites You to Join Him for the ‘High-Rise’ Trailer

Up until very recently, Ben Wheatley’s power-mad J.G. Ballard adaptation High-Rise was the hottest free agent in the film game. The film had been bouncing around festivals without any distributor in place, drawing raves and pans alike at the Toronto International Film Festival, Austin’s Fantastic Fest, and a handful of European programs, but never landing a wide-release date for American theaters. But a week ago, indie distributor Magnolia purchased High-Rise for release in U.S. markets through its genre imprint of Magnet Releasing, and while a hard public premiere date has yet to be set, it can’t be too far off. The first trailer for the film, released today, indicates that it’s only a matter of time until the rabid Tom Hiddleston fans and equally rabid J.G. Ballard fans get what they crave.

The trailer embedded above plays like a video advertisement inviting you to consider leasing a residence in the ultramodern (for the ’70s, at least) titular apartment complex. The film barely travels beyond the walls of this forty-story bourgeois behemoth, and the trailer shows that the building has nearly blossomed into a self-sustaining environment complete with not just pools and gyms, but a grassy rooftop park, doctors’ offices of every stripe, and a full supermarket. But even in this manmade Eden, trouble is a-brewing. Unchecked luxury can do crazy things to a person’s mind — all it takes is one group of children messing up the grown-ups’ pool soirée/key party before the residents of the high-rise form warlike tribes and turn on one another. The young up-and-comer new to the building that Hiddleston plays in the film gradually realizes he can either forge an alliance, or get mowed down like the plebeians.

I had the good fortune of catching the film’s world premiere earlier this year at TIFF, and I can say with all assurance that it really is a screaming good time, replete with baroque dialogue and Marxist undertones so heavy they might just be tones. The trailer will set us all at ease for now, but this is certainly one to watch for in 2016.