Why Tom Hiddleston's High-Rise is the ultimate marmite movie

Tom Hiddleston's new drama High-Rise has been panned as a misogynist "dog's dinner" by some critics, and the "social-surrealist film of the year" by others.

Based on JG Ballard's 1975 cult novel on the stratification and subsequent breakdown of society, High-Rise has drawn comparisons to The Lord of the Flies and A Clockwork Orange.

It centres on a tower block divided along class lines: the poor inhabit the lower floors while the elite reside at the top, in an opulent penthouse with a horse as a pet.

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Directed by Ben Wheatley, it opens with the tower block's newest resident, Dr Robert Laing, played by Hiddleston, blood-splattered and eating a dog on his balcony, then flashes back to three months earlier, when Laing first moved in, to document the demise of the building and its residents.

Scarlett Russel at Digital Spy says the apocalypse "never looked prettier". Sienna Miller plays a "loveable tart", while Jeremy Irons and Keeley Hawes play the rich architect and his wife.

"Political themes of class war and poverty are peppered with humour, while scenes of violence and even rape are softened by stunningly psychedelic photography," she says.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw also has high praise for the film's "gnomic refusal of normal storytelling and the way it approximates the distance of Ballard's prose". He describes it as an "ingenious adaptation" and "the social-surrealist film of the year".

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But it is the film's distancing that has earned it accusations of misogyny.

"Wheatley is so in love with his own visual style and excesses that all allegory and satire is lost while the violence escalates and women are beaten then raped," says Deborah Ross at The Spectator. "Misogyny with social commentary comments on misogyny, but without that it's just misogyny served up for its entertainment value."

The film visits some "very dark places", adds Ross, but it "doesn't have anything to say about inequality or social disorder or capitalism or anything at all".

Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times gives High-Rise just one star. "The film begins with a dog's dinner and then becomes one," he says, complaining about its lack of wit and tonal subtlety, as well as the "crudely monorhythmic" script.

But giving it five stars, Kate Muir at The Times says: "This is a film as English as Marmite, one to love or hate. I love it."

Ballard's novel made little of the lives of the women in the block, but Amy Jump's script emphasises their roles, Muir says: "Rarely is a period film so of the moment."

Perhaps the problem is that Wheatley has taken an "unreadable novel" and turned it into "an unwatchable film", argues David Edwards in the Daily Mirror.

"This is an arch, icy film whose visuals more than once recall the tonal styles of Stanley Kubrick – but it's also a movie that seems to take pleasure in distancing itself from its audience.

"Maybe that was what Wheatley was aiming for in a story about the dehumanising effects of capitalism.

"But just try sitting through it."