Starring Tom Hiddleston. Rated 18A.

The novelist J.G. Ballard possessed a unique genius for imagining new and exceptionally weird ways to ridicule and torture Britain’s middle class. A notorious triptych of novels from the ’70s already yielded one controversial, if dry, screen outing in 1996 with David Cronenberg’s Crash. For this version of High-Rise, in which an ultramodern (for 1975) suburban estate devolves into ultraviolent tribalism, director Ben Wheatley seems to have been more viscerally affected by Ballard’s perverse visions, drumming up a true love-it-or-hate-it proposition as decadent and unhinged as the behaviour it depicts.

At the centre of it all is Robert Laing, a doctor seen early in the film removing “the facial mask” from a severed head during a pathology class. As one of the new building’s “best amenities”, according to a single mother played by Sienna Miller, Tom Hiddleston and his gorgeous abdomen fit the bill with just the right amount of opaque moral ambivalence.

Not that Laing is welcomed by all inside this Brave New World of self-contained supermarkets, swimming pools, and endless cocktail parties. Even within the professional class, heirarchies emerge. The building itself is a top-down structure with the architect, Royal (a hollowed-out–looking Jeremy Irons), inhabiting a penthouse that comes with its own horse and peacocks, as well as a wife contemptuous of the lower orders (“The poor are always so obsessed with money,” she complains), and a cockney fixer none too shy about shitkicking the rabble.

Meanwhile, a hell-raising, super-potent Welsh documentarian from the ground floor named Wilder (Luke Evans, all sideburns and hip-hugging slacks) wants either revolution or some material for a new movie. It’s hard to say, and also irrelevant, as the film itself seems to yield to the same chaotic subterranean forces as its characters. In the hallucinatory orgy of sex and violence that follows, we learn why Laing is barbecuing his dog in the film’s prologue, and we gradually notice that a portion of the audience has left in disgust (probably). It’s that kind of film; anything less would have been a failure.