High-Rise played at this year’s 2015 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. The word was poison at first. There were whispers that this was Ben Wheatley at his most disappointing, breaking big in the worst way possible after a string of niche wonders (Kill List, Sightseers, A Field in England).

High-Rise Movie Review

Thankfully, this isn’t the case. High-Rise has something. What that something is will probably be best decided not by the instant discernment demanded of festival critics, but of some future generation digging up High-Rise out of a time capsule and determining once and for all whether this thing still has something to say to the Star Trek generation for whom class warfare, the 99%, and the rhetoric of inequality is nothing but period piece mood-dressing.

If judgment is demanded than it would be safe to say both that High-Rise is no Brazil but that it’s unlikely to slip into obscurity. The easiest comparison is Snowpiercer, but High-Rise is a very different movie: far less searing and angrily immediate. That’s okay, not everything has to burn like six feet of detonation cord.

Opening in an over-designed high-rise, High-Rise has an almost boilerplate dystopian aesthetic. Brands are bold, flat, and generic. Sex is swapped with disinterest. There are arcane rules for everything and the rich favor garish ostentation (in High-Rise they go full Barry Lyndon for high-society partying). Here then is the first High-Rise stumble: it’s version of depraved decadence can’t hold a candle to the humblest Saudi prince. High-Rise feels half-cocked like that for a while. It has darkly comedic touches—like a gory skull dissection or a dance number with Tom Hiddleston and a bevy of flight attendants—but doesn’t feel particularly confident in the gesture.

But this changes as High-Rise escalates a minor pool rebellion into full-fledged class insurrection. The transition is jarring. High-Rise dodges the finicky hows and whats in the transition from class-stratified civility to barbarism with what amounts to lengthy montage. Still, the quick ramp-up is well worth it, as High-Rise soars into a strange kaleidoscope of otherworldly horror worthy of Cronenberg’s Interzone.

While it’s easy to see what High-Rise critiques, as the rich upper floors move from hoarding electricity to reenacting sordid Sabine kidnappings, determining why High-Rise is about what it’s about is trickier. We are invited to both admire the optimism in a Che Guevara poster and laugh at its moral simplicity. But High-Rise also takes a run at struggles that fall outside our simplest class warfare thinking. As the high-rise society falls apart the current stratification isn’t really shook, just turned savage. There is no crescendo building to the lower floors storming the upper. Instead the existing order is beaten into corner until everyone, rich and poor alike, are forced to bare their teeth.

High-Rise doesn’t feel like a condemnation or a parable, but a movie in search of the full chaos of class and power. Just as Luke Evans’ Wilder (who stands out as a lower-class crusader in thrall to his lower urges as much as his ideals) embraces class revolution as a vanity project High-Rise never feels like it needs to be politically astute to throws itself at the real world.

Which is why defining this one is a job best left to the future. When you’re experiencing the class war in day-to-day headlines it’s easy to hold the lived experience against a movie that dares to stand for society. High-Rise might well prove useful shorthand, capturing a cultural moment that all of us were too busy living through to encompass for ourselves.

High-Rise screened at the 2015 Fantastic Fest but doesn’t yet have a U.S. release date set.