Highest 2 Lowest | My Review

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Highest 2 Lowest hit me in a way I wasn’t really ready for. It starts out flashy, right? The “highest” part of the story is painted with so much gloss—fast cars, penthouse views, champagne spilling over crystal rims, people laughing too loudly at parties where the music never seems to stop. The kind of life where everything looks perfect, almost too perfect, like you’re watching a highlight reel that hides all the cuts and bruises behind it. At first, you almost want to be there—swept up in that reckless luxury.

However, practically, suddenly, it goes tilt. The cracks start showing. It was there that the movie grabbed my attention, as you see the title is not merely an intelligent one, but a map of where you are about to go. The characters are on the top of the world and the next, they are falling. And it is not a swift drop, it is a slow, crunching, shameful one. This is where there is one scene where the protagonist (we can find him as he struggles to hold his image together by using his hands) is confronted in front of the people whom he was able to impress before. I could feel so crude in that moment, as though the whole room shifted its collective back to him and he would no longer be untouchable, he would be so very human and frightened.

The film does not alleviate the fall either. You touch it in all its minutiae--when you have to pledge your costly costumes, when you lose your friends since there is no more money to boast of, when there are too many silences at the dinner table since you no longer have anything to make boasts of. I believe that the most heart wrenching moment to me was when he was sitting in his car where he only looked at the reflection of himself in the rearview mirror and whispered to himself as though he was trying to persuade his own ghost that he did not yet completely lose his meaning. That scene punched me. I never had his specific life but I have had that empty sadness of losing something that used to be a part of you.

And the twists--God, the film does not give you the opportunity to relax. It takes another strand each time you start thinking, this is as far as it can get, he can no longer go lower. It is the people he once trusted, who betray him. Careers are lost in clouds. The slightest opportunities of reconstruction are snatched by pride or desperation. This is where he nearly scratches his way up again--as though you were on his side, and your heart in your throat--but a slip, one slip, and he falls straddling the world again. And sitting through that, I felt my chest tighten, because it mirrors life too well. How sometimes we’re our own undoing, how sometimes the world just doesn’t forgive as easily as we hope.

The loss of a self was the most significant thing to me as I was not only deprived of wealth or status. It was cruel to sit and see a person break down bit by bit knowing that the identity which he or she created was weak. However, it was too familiar. It caused me to examine myself, at what aspects of my life I have been attaching to superficiality, and question, in the event that it was all stripped away, who would I have become anyway?

The introductory montage hurls you immediately into the uppermost: bubbles in glasses full of champagne, blue neon-lighting in rooftop swimming pools, faces leaning in and laughing as though they are in the midst of the largest secret in the world. And there in the middle, our guy, all sharp-dressed, with a smile that wide, as though he were the king of it. You can nearly feel that illusion of safety, the arrogance that one feels when they are sure the high will not stop. The camera is on him handshaking, deals going on, women clinging to him by his arm, and you say: all right, he is untouchable.

Then, the slip. It’s subtle at first. One of those phone calls that he does not want to pick up. When a name of a bank appears on his caller ID, there is a momentary worry in his eyes. He covers it with a laugh, dusts it off, yet you pick it, that seed of dread which he is so endeavouring to bury. And here is where the lowest starts, shadowy, as though behind the glitter.

One of those parties is when the first big gut-punch moment happens. He is at the stage, giving a toast and a man breaks through the crowd, someone he owes, someone who does not care how he looks. The battle is street-fighting, ferocious. Screams increase, glasses fall and the music stutters. And at that instant you can watch the change--the entire room which was revolving around him, recedes. One can half make out the general opinion: perhaps he is not as solid as we thought. That humiliation is sharp. I cursed that I felt my stomach tightening on his behalf.

There, the spiral is not dramatic, it is grinding. In one of the scenes, he is shown in a pawn shop, sliding a watch across the counter which is the same watch we had seen in the initial scenes shining. The pawnbroker does not even appear to be impressed, merely muttering a number, which seems to be an offense. You see his jaw set and his hand shake when taking the cash. It is a little thing, but it is a killer, as it is not the watch, it is the dignity that is spurting like a red fountain.

Then there’s the car scene. God, this one gutted me. He is parked at night, with the lights of the city obscured on the windshield, and with his eyes on the rearview mirror. He says--with just his lips--you are somebody. You’re still somebody.” Over and over. And you know he does not think so. It was more like a punch in the head since I too have such nights, when, sitting alone, I am trying to convince myself that I am still worth something and all that surrounds me seems to fall apart.

The betrayals come next. Friends vanish, one by one. The man who would hype him at their parties will not pick up. The woman who has been bending on his arm bends on another. There’s a brutal scene where he runs into one of them in public, and they look through him—like he’s invisible, like he’s already erased. That kind of abandonment hurts deeper than the money.

And then the desperate grasp for redemption. He gets one last shot—an investor willing to hear him out. You see him preparing in front of the mirror again, but this time the suit is wrinkled, the tie a little crooked. He gives everything in that pitch—every word dripping with hunger, with need. And for a second, you think maybe—maybe this is it. Maybe he’s about to claw his way back. But no. The investor shuts him down, cold, efficient, like slicing through flesh with a blade. Watching his face fall in that moment felt like my own chest caving in.

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