With brutal cannibal love story Trouble Every Day, Claire Denis helped usher in a wave of French horror at the turn of the century known as New French Extremity. In High Life, Denis tries her hand at science fiction, but done in her naturalistic, heady style that trades high tech science in favor of exploring what deep space isolation can do on one’s mental state. There are no aliens in this strange sci-fi horror film, but alienation can be just as scary.
The film opens with an introduction to Monte (Robert Pattinson), working on maintenance of the spacecraft exterior while also trying to keep the fussy baby inside distracted. He’s all alone with his infant daughter Willow on this ship somewhere at the furthest reaches of space. How he ended up there remains a mystery for a while as he works to raise his daughter and keep them both alive on this ship. This includes conserving ship resources by flushing dead bodies kept on cryo-freeze out of the airlock. Denis unravels the mystery in meditative fashion, fragmented in time.
We soon find that Monte was part of a crew filled with death row and life sentence inmates, who were offered a chance at redemption in the form of a deep space mission to attempt to harvest energy for Earth from black holes. The truth, though, is that they’re guinea pigs for experiments in zero-gravity fertility. Their experiment overseer, is Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), a calculating woman who collects sperm from the men and uses it to impregnate the women. Monte is the sole holdout, holding fast to abstinence instead.
But as the opening conveys, things won’t end up well for this crew. Not only does deep space isolation do a number on sanity, but these people were society’s rejects to begin with. Mia Goth is the unruliest of the females as Boyse, a combative but former crack addict with a loose grip on sanity. Andre Benjamin’s Tcherny is the kindest of the reformed inmates and also the one most at peace. They’re rounded out with Lars Eidinger, Ewan Mitchell, Agata Buzek, Claire Tran and Gloria Obianyo as the rest of the unwitting guinea pigs, all who bring their own unique set of personalities and complications to the fold. The more we learn about this crew, the darker and more sinister it gets. The horrors of the crew’s unraveling are juxtaposed with the quiet solitude of Monte raising Willow from infant to teenager, and what that might mean for a young woman who’s never known anyone else but her father.
The ship’s design is simplistic and drab, sometimes punctuated by striking visuals. Especially in the case of deep space. There’s a feeling of suffocating existential dread within the spacecraft, but a weightless beauty outside its walls – the black hole nearby is stunning, though potentially deadly. The gloomy, haunting score also furthers the themes of isolation. This is an actor’s movie; everything is simple by design, it’s the actors’ performances that keep the viewer enthralled by this story. It also means that there aren’t clear cut answers for everything, this is mood and emotion driven.
Pattinson conveys so much depth of emotion on his face without uttering a word, which goes far in those long stretches without dialogue. Binoche threatens to steal the film from him as the mother figure harboring dark secrets of her own and an increasingly unhealthy sexual appetite. The lengths she’s willing to go for her experiments horrify as her madness spirals to new lows.
High Life won’t be for everyone. It’s more of an arthouse meditation on time, death, taboos, solitude, and the cruelty of man than overt mainstream horror. Deliberate and unyielding. The horror is there, though. Stark moments of brutality and violence punctuate the quiet, and certain deaths are extremely bloody. But it’s the realization of just how cruel humanity can be that Denis sneaks up on you that proves to be the most horrifying.
