High-Rise has been a long time coming to the cinema screen. J.G. Ballard's novel of the same name has been slated for adaptation almost since it was published in 1975: director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth) was provisionally attached to the project in the late 1970s, as was, more recently, Canadian science-fiction director Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice). It has taken British director Ben Wheatley to bring a film version to completion, with man of the moment Tom Hiddleston – star of critically acclaimed television mini-series The Night Manager – in the role of Dr Robert Laing, resident of the titular building.

Ballard's High-Rise is a potent imagining of a localised apocalypse. The novel takes place almost entirely within the confines of a new luxury apartment block, forty storeys high: as the building's systems (elevators, electricity, air-conditioning) gradually malfunction, the residents descend into lawless ferocity. High-Rise has no shortage of vivid images to tempt the eager filmmaker, from a ransacked supermarket to an Afghan hound floating dead in a swimming pool. What's harder to convey is that distinctive Ballardian tone, which is coolly erotic, fusing repulsion and pleasure in its depiction of the building's increasingly fetid atmosphere and the residents' wolfish appetites.