Directed by: Claire Denis
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth, André Benjamin
Rated R, 110 minutes
“High Life,” the latest example of the recent trend of highly philosophical and uncanny sci-fi cinema (see last year’s “Annihilation,” or 2017’s “Arrival”), begins in perhaps the most irritating way a movie can begin. In the opening scenes, we watch a man and his infant daughter, all alone on a spaceship, keeping house and passing the time. This means that the first several minutes of the movie are nearly silent, consisting mostly of a man doing his chores, his work punctuated only by the sound of a child’s laborious, throat-mauling cries.
On the one hand, this is a torturous way to start a movie; on the other hand, these opening images do set up the movie to come, which is similarly harrowing. As we learn, through narration and flashback, the ship at one point had a full crew, made up of death row inmates who were shipped off into space to head for a black hole in order to study it and, eventually, plunge headlong into it. Theirs is a suicide mission for the sake of science, a mission for which nobody feels much pride, except maybe the resident physician, Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche, “Chocolat”), whose singular wish is to see a child born on the unnamed vessel. Eventually, through some unsavory manipulation, she gets what she wants: a child born to one of the other inmates, a child who will know nothing else but life in space.
This is the child we see at the movie’s beginning; the man is the baby’s father, Monte (Robert Pattinson, “Twilight”), a reticent and easily frustrated man who was put on death row for murdering a friend and who has come to accept his death sentence. Although the story is driven largely by Dr. Dibs’ desperate need for control—mission control, behavior control, sexual control—the narrative truly belongs to Monte, who lives out a tragic and ironic story of perseverance in the face of certain annihilation.
We learn early on that everyone on the ship is already dead, except for Monte and the baby. We don’t know why, but when we finally find out, it doesn’t hit us like a major revelation—there has been no alien attack, no mutiny, no single event that explains the downfall of the crew. There is only the violent nature of these characters, confined to their small space, stewing and turning on each other. Despite this, the movie doesn’t actually feel violent or inhumane. The scenes, with only a few exceptions, are quiet and modest; shots linger on someone moving an arm or taking a seat, or sometimes not doing anything at all. The ship has a vegetable garden onboard.
The movie is full of these sorts of strange moments and contradictions, and writer-director Claire Denis (“White Material”) assembles these pieces into a nonlinear puzzle designed not so much to tell a story as to show us what it looks like for people to regress to their most basic human instincts. As an experiment, the movie is ambitious; as an exploration of human behavior, it is both far-reaching and profound. If Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey” was a depiction of mankind as a bunch of impersonal drones etherized by their technology, “High Life” is the rebuttal, an assertion that basic human needs—for social contact, for comfort, for pride in one’s efforts—will trump all else, even when those things are scarcely to be found.
However, “High Life” never quite turns its profound imagery into the profound questions it wants to ask. And it does itself no favors; consider the laborious pacing throughout, which makes the viewing experience a slog. There are movies that allow us to contemplate and reflect, and then there are movies that make us wait, and “High Life” is too often the latter. The movie is also structurally ambivalent, its episodic scenes shuffled together seemingly at random, Robert Pattinson’s narration sounding like the tape trying to patch up the cracks. Claire Denis has taken a compelling premise and attached it to evocative images, but her convictions about humanity’s basic impulses are undercut by an approach that’s too high-minded and inscrutable to connect with her audience. It’s all ego, no id.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 4/19/19.