TheDoomSong

High Life features a somewhat interesting premise and is ultimately bogged down by many indie film clichés that unfortunately all work out in the worst possible way.

The most aggrivating thing about the film by auteuresse Claire Denis is its sluggish pace, which shows in many different ways: Scenes continue for too long and are dragged out by drowsy, listless performances. Given, the sedation of the space ships inmates is a valid plot point that is addressed and in context makes some sense, but is it really worth it if that means that each scene feels like you are watching it in slow-motion? The pace is further disturbed and hindered by completely needless time-jumps, that add next to nothing to building tension or creating an intriguing narrative and instead make the film move even slower. One of the most painful scenes is happening about two thirds into the movie, when Juliette Binoche's wicked fertility doctor increases the sedative in the crew's water and the acting therefore becoming even more slurred and bored from there on.

The sound mix does not help as it decides to make the often mumbled, whispered lines often inaudible, even though there is barely a score to hide them behind. It is a very regrettable choice for what interesting bits High Life has to offer, they are almost entirely delivered in the odd, meaningful, ominous line here and there and very rarely presented visually.

Which introduces the next problem: The film is not a looker at all, which is a shame considering what other low-budget movies managed to get out of a sci-fi setting by actually using creativity and craftsmanship to counter the lack of grandiose CGI (e.g. Prospect) . But High Life features one of the least inspired and frankly ugliest set designs in the recent years, with a ship looking like a rusty Lego brick, suits that seem to have been fabricated by sewing rags together and sparse use of tech that looks like it was just ordered off Amazon for a few hundred bucks and thrown in the shot entirely without dressing up. Granted, the rag-tag ambience is a deliberate choice, but how unique and interesting are the gadgets that the inmates in the movie are clobbering together going to look, if everything else looks the same?

Apart from shortcomings stemming from the limited budget and the poor artistic choices, what eventually undoes High Life in its entirety is the nonsensical plot, that deals with prisoners being shot into space to somehow retrieve information on alternative energy sources from a black hole. How? We don't really get to know. Why these specific people? We don't get to know that either. And in combination with a ludicrous plot about artificial insemination that is forced upon the inmates by yet another inmate the film just crumbles apart. The power structure within the ship's crew makes no sense and should fall apart from the get-go. For unexplained reasons everybody maintains the cruel and absurd goings-on until the logical meltdown is somehow played as a cathartic happening.

The best thing about High Life are the performances by Binoche, whose disturbed and broken doctor persona keeps you interested as you never quite know how tight her power-grip is and how far she can and is willing to push her cruel experiments. Pattinson is solid, if a bit one-dimensional. The breakout performance is clearly delivered by Mia Goth who plays Boyse, a fretful but fierce wild-child who makes fickle alliances with different characters to benefit her goals that - besides her survival - are never fully formed.

In the end, High Life is utterly unenjoyable and never manages to lift the interesting premise above what it is - instead showing shortcomings on almost all levels, from narration to direction.

Anthologies are always hard to pull off, if you want to do it right. In most of them the quality of the different segments varies greatly and you only get to enjoy fragments of the movie while the project in its entirety fails to connect with the viewer. That is even more the case when the anthology is supposed to be tied together by another story arc that provides a decent beginning and ending while connecting each story to one another.

V/H/S does not have this aspiration at all. The setup couldn't be more straight forward: A few guys are breaking into a house to steal an ominous video tape. They find a huge pile of tapes and proceed to watch all of them to find out which one they are supposed to get. As nonsensical as that sounds, it provides a good explanation to what you are going to watch in the following 90 minutes: shaky hand-held horror.

V/H/S presents five "spooky" tapes (not including the beginning and the end) which at best make you twitch because they rely almost exclusively on jump scares. Where they don't they make absolutely no sense, are boring, uninspired and staged by terrible actors. The biggest disappointment is that none of the stories have a shred of originality in them. They all seem like cheap copies from the bottom of the creepypasta barrel. In fact the only thing missing was somebody screaming BUT WHO WAS PHONE?! after the credits had run through.

All in all V/H/S is a huge letdown and does not justify any amount of money being spent on it.