A most wicked thing indeed, Clint Mansell’s mesmerising score for High-Rise manages to trap you deep inside claustrophobic opulence before you’ve even set eyes upon a single frame of Ben Wheatley’s troublingly relevant slice of societal horror.

From the outset, Mansell’s High-Rise puts up grand walls, painting them with rich flourishes, the initial focus on orchestral bombast and bouncing joie de vivre. As with the film, you’re somewhat exhausted by the time the climax arrives and a sense of dread has all but physically manifested before you, but the composer is clever enough to avoid taking a sledgehammer to his enclosure. Cracks and decay are everywhere, the façade beyond salvage. Why not have some fun as it all falls down?

‘Critical Mass’ is a glorious introduction, all regal strings that point and pierce skyward. This is particularly impressive muscle-flexing from Mansell, no stranger to the orchestra pit, as he contains this huge sound in a much smaller world than usual. ‘Silent Corridors’ sweeps forward as curiosity, wonder and peril emerge via subtle woodwind and percussion work. These first few compositions serve as topsy-turvy ascent, with ‘The World Beyond the High-Rise’ and ‘The Vertical City’ full of early optimism before both allow shadows to take shape.

Mansell creates a woozy atmosphere befitting of an impossible, dangerous labyrinth. Recurring notes and motifs come to feel extremely sinister – the spectral cry found in the opening seconds of ‘The Circle of Women’, for instance – and there’s an undeniable chill in this air. Paranoia quickly joins the fray with ‘Danger In The Streets of the Sky’, which deals in the kind of climbing operatic tension usually reserved for the third act showdown of an actioner or the grand reveal of a complex mystery. Onscreen, this moment, in line with the entire work, underscores the bubbling savagery waiting to burst forth.

Listening to it closely, detaching oneself entirely from JG Ballard’s book and Wheatley’s smart adaptation, Mansell elegantly constructs the ideal soundtrack with which to choose your own dystopia. Relief is rare, usually drowned out by the suspiciously convivial, never-too-far-away strings introduced at the beginning, or by something much more gloom-soaked as heard in the brooding ‘Cine-Camera Cinema’, which brings to mind some of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s superb, drone-heavy offerings on last year’s score for Sicario.

Elsewhere, there are marches – the drums on ‘A Royal Flying School’ absolutely gigantic, not simply due to Mansell’s sparing deployment of percussive elements throughout – and dreamlike/nightmarish waltzes; ‘The Evening’s Entertainment’ and the closing ‘Blood Garden’ both flirting with the brightest and darkest colours the mind can fathom.

As Wheatley’s High-Rise nears its conclusion, a Portishead cover of ABBA’s ‘S.O.S.’ rises murkily above a montage of bloody collapse. It’s a powerful, transformative body blow, underpinning all of the grime and gore that has come to take centre stage. Yet as note-perfect as this inclusion may be, true menace and teeth are found throughout Mansell’s score, a work that somehow registers as both oppressive and liberating. He has delivered bigger, dazzling crescendos and arguably more crowd-pleasing fare, but High-Rise unlocks fresh, impish exuberance.