High-Rise: 10 Towering Tower Block Movies

By Steve Palace / March 19, 2016

Ben Wheatley's adaptation of J G Ballard's High-Rise takes the lift to cinemaland this week, hoping to challenge and freak out audiences with its mix of social satire and outrageous content. Tom Hiddleston stars in the avant garde director's most star-studded and high profile release to date. The tale is well-known in literary circles, but its setting is one the big screen has utilized to great effect many times. A tower block is always going to be good fodder for human stories, being a cross section of personalities piled on top of each other, producing frequently frightening results. Comedy, drama, action and all-out catastrophe - vertical slabs of concrete have played host to all manner of scenarios over the years. Whether lined with gleaming chrome or covered in graffiti, upper class to lower class, there's a range of accommodation to suit all tastes here.

10. Downtime

Former Time Lord Paul McGann made a bid for movie stardom in this gritty thriller from 1998. Directed by Bharat Nalluri (Spooks: The Greater Good), it was a low budget effort that wrung maximum tension from its claustrophobic scenario. McGann appeared with Susan Lynch as a pair looking for romance in that most natural of circumstances - the suicide talk-down. Having prevented her from throwing herself off a balcony, the action moved to the lift shaft, where they got trapped thanks to a marauding mob. It was marketed as "Ken Loach meets Die Hard", which probably seemed like a good idea at the time. One of the numerous attempts to give British cinema a kick up the jacksie, sadly it's little-remembered today.