High Life is almost an anti-science fiction movie, a work that has affection less for the visual character of the sci-fi genre than for what that imagery can yield toward such classic Denis themes as isolation and exploitation.
We begin, after all, on a slow-gliding shot of a garden. Which is itself the food source on an unremarkable looking spaceship that looks like a backup battery pack phone charger. Robert Pattinson, an actor I still find mostly a blank stare, carries the picture with that blankness. Denis’ best work has been with expressive actors who carry in them an element of essential strangeness, which makes High Life an outlier of sorts.
Pattinson is quite affecting as Monte, a prisoner on spaceship where prisoners are on a mission to a black hole. (The idea is to harness the black hole’s power for use as an Earthly energy source.) The prisoners think they’ll win their freedom, but the whole thing is a kind of perverse double-cross that ends badly.
Denis gives us the narrative out of order — itself a kind of double-crossing of story that allows her to brush past the sci-fi conventions and get to the oddities of humans in space.
The twist involves both Juliette Binoche and the sexualized science. Binoche’s character, coyly named “Dibs,” is running experiments on the death row prisoners.
Monte got convicted for, as a child, killing his best friend over a dog. And Monte certainly has the monotone and saltine pallor of someone who’s been on death row that long. By the time Denis’ stirring ending flashes before us, we’ve been sat alongside Monte long enough to have never actually seen his crime.Thus we feel a deep, unusual-for-Denis ambivalence toward what he and his companion may or may not be soaring into.
High Life — THREE STARS
Directed by Claire Denis
A24
110 min.
Lewis On Film 