I'm having difficulty parsing Claire Denis's "High Life." I understood going in that this is an art film, as well as being the acclaimed French director's first genre film. I've seen five of her other films to date, and have had mixed reactions to them. However, that didn't prepare me for the sheer incongruousness of "High Life" with just about every other piece of media set in space that I've ever seen.
First, we're introduced to Monte (Robert Pattinson), the last astronaut left alive aboard a spacecraft that is traveling toward a black hole. He cares for a tiny baby girl, Willow, and ineffectually tries to make repairs to the ship. He sends progress reports back to Earth, but no one appears to be listening. Through flashbacks, we learn how he got to this point. Originally the ship had a full crew of convict volunteers who were tricked into the mission. These include a young woman, Boyse (Mia Goth), a man obsessed with the ship's garden, Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), and the sinister Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche). Dibs, the only apparent authority on the ship, uses the rest of the crew to carry out reproductive experiments, obsessed with producing a child.
Sex is the subject matter of a good chunk of the film, as Dr. Dibs manipulates the crew members and continually tries to proposition a reluctant Monte. However, none of this is portrayed as remotely sexy or appealing. Contact and intimacy are wholly missing from the equation, as exemplified by "The Box," a chamber that serves as a sinister masturbation aid. There's a vaguely disturbing, queasy feeling that accompanies images of oozing breastmilk and spilled semen. Nobody aside from Dr. Dibs seems to have any particular interest in continuing the species. When an attempted rape occurs, the goal is clearly violence rather than pleasure.
There's an overwhelming sense of nihilism throughout most of the film, as we watch the characters die off one by one. Some are killed by accident, some through acts of violence and malice. Many are suicidal. At one point the movie begins to feel like a catalog of different ways to die, each death causing little fuss and evoking little reaction among the dwindling survivors. Most of them are heavily drugged and emotionally disturbed, growing more and more alienated as time goes on. It's a terribly numbing thing to watch, and the briefly hopeful ending didn't really help to assuage this.
"High Life" does have scenes involving space walks and shuttle flights, and other familiar tropes of the space adventure genre. There are a few lovely shots of star fields and the black hole that is Monte's destination. However, the movie is certainly not an adventure film in the traditional sense. Nor is it one of the popular breed of scrappy, cerebral space thrillers that occasionally come out of independent film. I've seen it called a melodrama, horror, and even a mystery film, none of which really get to the spiritual moroseness of the story. I'd be tempted to compare it to the existential science-fiction films of Andrei Tarkovsky, except that all the crude sexuality and dehumanizing violence makes it feel a lot more like something Gaspar Noe or Michael Haneke might have dreamed up.
What really unnerves me, however, is that "High Life" is such an ugly film, perhaps on purpose. Space flight is never treated as spectacle, but as something full of danger and discomfort. The ship itself is reportedly very true to life, all functional and no frills. The segments with the crew slowly disintegrating are claustrophobic and murky. Several of the actors are very attractive, including the luminous Juliette Binoche, but frequently framed and positioned in ways that make them look monstrous. If "High Life" is meant to be a counterpoint to all the glossy space movies produced by Hollywood, it certainly succeeds.
In the end, I have to call "High Life" an impressive work, but like many of Claire Denis' films it's a hard one to love. There's such an an unrelenting bleakness to much of it, and such a blunt handling of sensitive material, I found myself disconnecting emotionally just to get through it. More hardened art house lovers may not have the same issues, however. I certainly suggest going into this only if you have a tough skin and a sound mind.
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