After decades of making inscrutable films, Claire Denis’ High Life might be her most daring yet. Her English-language debut, starring a former teen icon, has a sci-fi premise that could have attracted genre fans. Even with all those elements, Denis has no interest in the mainstream, whether it’s her conflict, structure or use of special effects. While Rotten Tomatoes is an imperfect metric, there is little surprise it received an 82 rating from critics and a 42 rating from audiences, one of the biggest gaps in the site’s history. High Life was never going to be popular, except among folks who watch Tarkovsky movies for fun, and it’s thanks to Denis’ talent she still managed to get it made in the first place.
Before we get to the premise and the infamous “Box,” the spaceship where the film mostly takes place deserves its own attention. The ship has looks drab and timeless, with the kind of erosion that would happen after no one expressed an interest in the upkeep. Its look is crucial to the effect, since the characters are all prison volunteers who are going through various stages of despair (this is in marked contrast to the recent film Spiderhead, which makes its high-tech prison look almost like a resort). Denis has little interest in space exploration, and instead considers the psychic toll of an existence without sunlight, warmth, or fresh air. In emotional terms, her conclusions are realistic but grim.
Pattinson plays Monte, one of the few characters who finds meaning through life because he is a reluctant father. The opening scenes are documentary-like, with Monte caring for a child with a mix of attentiveness, warmth, and frustration. At one point, he practically screams into her face because he is at the end of his rope, the kind of outburst that imagine most honest parents will recognize. At this point, those unfamiliar with Beau Travail and Denis’ other films may be confused. Where is the rest of the crew? What exactly happened to them? Denis does get around to answering those questions, but in an oblique way that requires careful attention from the reviewer. Nothing close to a traditional payoff ever happens
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We do learn about the other prisoners, such as Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), who sees time in space as penance only he fully understands. There are other people sleepwalking through life, yet the real antagonist is Dibs (Juliette Binoche), whose presence on the ship is downright malignant. As both a researcher and prisoner herself, she manipulates the others and acts above them, creating a tense dynamic that leads to intense outbursts.
With Monte as a notable exception, the ship both need and depend on “The Box,” a shadowy room of sexual pleasure where the release is more intense than typical masturbation. While not entirely explicit, High Life is sexually frank for a sci-fi film, and why not? Sex is an apt metaphor by which to consider the desire to continue life, alongside the impossibility of life in space. Still, the box is not enough to sate some of the characters, leading to disturbing rape scenes (yes, plural) where the need for power and control is more important than any gratification. Like a more traditional prison drama, Denis sees space where desperate characters look for whatever little dominance they can find, especially if it means taking agency away from someone else.
The final stretch of High Life is a bittersweet coda where Monte and his daughter Willow, who is now a teenager, finally try and find some purpose during their journey. It is hard to say just how much time elapses on the spaceship – 20 years, maybe more – but by not addressing the numbers directly, Denis and her co-screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau get the audience to think about the passing of time in purely emotional terms. Pattinson does not visibly age, and instead his gait and demeanor show how the spaceship and its inhabitants alternately broke them, or find him a reason to hope. Space is the final frontier to these lonely explorers only by default, and yet there is excitement in their abstract, reluctant segue toward the unknown.
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