Following his divorce, doctor and medical-school lecturer Robert Laing moves into his new apartment on the 25th floor of a recently completed high-rise building on the outskirts of London.

This tower block provides its affluent tenants all the conveniences and commodities that modern life has to offer: a supermarket, bank, restaurant, hair salon, swimming pools, a gymnasium, its own school, and high-speed lifts.

Life in the high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty grievances among neighbours and between rival floors escalate into an orgy of violence.

As the amenities of the high-rise break down and bodies begin to pile up, no one considers leaving or alerting the authorities, instead exploring the newly-found urges and desires engendered by the building's disintegration.

Aside from the fact that they both came out the same year, both the book and the film tell a story in which the tenants of a humongous, isolated hi-tech residential building wind up descending into an anarchic orgy of sex and violence.

Although lacking in formal precision and narrative tightness, compared to Cronenberg's later, more mature films, it has been suggested that this is a truer (yet serendipitous) adaptation of the novel than Ben Wheatley's 2015 version.