High Life

Worth a watch I suppose, but barely. A highly acclaimed director/writer and a highly praised film by many critics. However I thought it was mostly just boring and stupid. It wants so bad to be a thought provoking Bergman or Kubrick type of film, but just ends up feeling like another over done Von Trier pile of garbage. 5/10

I've heard of Claire Denis but shamefully have never seen any of her work. I liked the trailer for this film. It seemed like a high concept space thriller, which as you know is something that is in my wheelhouse. I also have faith in everything A24 produces so I had to see this as soon as it came out. Having watched it the film is certainly visually arresting and quite disturbing. I'm not sure it fully meets what I was hoping for but Denis's film is thought provoking and asks questions of what humans in loneliness would do when on the brink of madness.

The film is about a space crew consisting of criminals and their mission of going towards a black hole to find a new energy source. The space crew soon realize that the doctor on the ship has some alternative ideas that include invasive sexual procedures meant to create life. I'm still not exactly certain on the solidity of that plot but this is the general gist. Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche lead with supporting performances from Andre 3000 and the always lovely Mia Goth.

There's talent on display in High Life. Pattinson is a very solid actor as could be seen from his other A24 feature, Good Time. The film looks like an authentic look into a space ship and I thought the film possessed some brilliant cinematography and camera handling. I especially liked the look of the black hole and the actions that occurred when approaching the black hole. I like when science fiction films (space ones namely) maintain the integrity of science and that seemed to be the case here.

The film borders on being very out there almost drifting off in plot like the bodies in space. What we see though is a fairly disturbing sexually charged mission in space with characters descending into utter madness and chaos. The film is definitely reminiscent of other space films before it but Denis strives to set it apart. I think its an impressively made film though it doesn't always work for me. It may require another watch to fully grasp and comprehend what Denis tried to go for.

6.5/10

Claire Denis' 'High Life' is undoubtedly better on paper than it is on the screen. One has to assume that the script includes certain details like what "The Box" is, or clarify the discrepancy between the fates of the astronaut's bodies early on versus what we're shown throughout the movie.

Despite the film's limited dialogue, many of the lines feel bizarrely stilted, as if there was a problem in the French-to-English translation regarding the emotional meaning of what Denis was hoping to convey.

As a result, Denis has ultimately made a film that is just interesting enough to keep the audience's attention the entire time, but lackluster enough for them to never really care. Worse, the last twenty minutes are so packed with logical flaws that 'High Life' crashes into its final destination rather than ending on anything that resembles a high note, sadly wasting another superb performance by Robert Pattinson whose time and effort could have been better spent on something else.

"High Life" is obsessed with sex in space, or the lack thereof. A bunch of convicts find themselves in a new sort of prison in a spaceship far from Earth. A mother and wife who murdered her family becomes a mad doctor obsessed with procreation and mating with another man. Actually, nobody has consensual sex, which seems to be banned for whatever reason, aboard the craft. Instead, they masturbate a lot, including for the doctor's collection of sperm in her ongoing in vitro fertilization experiments. Otherwise, there's celibacy and rape. There's a room onboard specifically designated for onanism, with one scene featuring the doctor straddling a dildo chair.

Images of space stand in as symbolic of a womb. There's a focus on fluids--semen, blood, water and such. Plus, there's the fertility of the garden. The picture begins with the reminder of the result of sex by way of scenes of an infant and her father. The backstory is filled in non-linearly later on, including that the rocketship is accelerating towards a black hole. There's no need to explain what the metaphor of that is. Hardly a need for the movie in general, either, which doesn't seem as interesting to me as it apparently does to some critics. The slow pacing and emptiness of space here merely seems to suggest a lack of anything compelling to move towards or to fill it with.

And the seemingly-random images transmitted from Earth remain baffling to me, including the early clip from "In the Land of the Head Hunters" (1914), although I don't recall any horses being in that film, which is why I first thought it was from some Thomas H. Ince silent Western. Regardless, at least, that offered some brief, as they say, "mental masturbation."

The movie works only as a metaphor of the universe: empty and meaningless.