High Life

I won't bother re-iterating what other people have said about the movie, the plot (or lack thereof) and the pointless one-dimensional characters. I will say there is a certain creepy vibe to the movie that is appealing but it never really pays off. It's just kind of an atmosphere more than anything. And that got reminding me of how Solaris (both of them) had the same tone and feeling but had a great story to it - without being all contrived like this empty plot and a few random scenes of soft-core sex that seemed to be shoe-horned in.

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

"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."

My wife and I watched this at home on DVD from our public library. We had high hopes based on some DVD box comments but in the end we were disappointed. It wasn't a total loss but we got so little for the time invested.

As is explained in the DVD extras the writer/director does not like to spell everything out, she wants the viewers to extrapolate and interpret. As a result the movie is rather deliberate and not everything makes sense.

It is a space mission outside our Solar system, presumably to study reproduction during space travel and also to travel to the vicinity of a black hole to see if its energy can be harvested for Earth use. But to get there they have to travel for years at 99% the speed of light, communications with Earth no longer possible, and even if they were successful with the black hole how would the energy be transported?

So the science and physics is very shaky, however only there for a setting for the story, most of which is how a bunch of criminals would interact on a long, secluded journey if all their survivals depended on it?

The movie has some interesting elements but overall we found it to be a big miss, not worthy of the almost 2 hours to view it.

I really enjoyed this film, but I cannot imagine the average moviegoer would care too much for it. If you enjoy arthouse films, then you should probably give this a shot- it has some wonderfully meditative themes, some great performances, and a completely original story. But if you only go to the movies to see the latest Marvel flick, I can almost guarantee you'll think this movie weird and probably a little messed up.