Crisis looms for the Earth, as it does in so many classic sci-fi films. Some terrestrial governing body has decided to send prisoners out into space to do all the research and mistake-making — all the things that are too risky to use valued people for. The premise is all too plausible, and High Life, the new film from textural master Claire Denis (Beau Travail, White Material), feels perfectly in tune with the now. In space, we find we’ve sent the absolute truth of ourselves out into the mystery.
Here is a system built around accomplishing tasks for unseen administrators and begging for our lives at the start of the workday, giving both present and future to a system built on making the specific into the general. This is a vision of humanity with all those distinguishing characteristics sanded away by bureaucracy, contempt and dehumanization — think Alien3, but without the religious structure.
Monte (Robert Pattinson) is our constant in a story that drifts through time, a man trying to keep the lights on in a prison box with a one-way ticket to a black hole. Other inmates flash back into existence. There’s mysterious Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche, scandalous and reminiscent of Madeleine Reynal in Caligari ’89), presiding over everyone’s survival even as she extracts their fluids for Moreauvian experiments with a sexual Room of Requirement called “the Fuck Box.” Gardener Tcherny (André Benjamin, aka André 3000, bringing empathy and pragmatism to a wisp of a role) keeps the only tactile memories of Earth alive for the ship, while the fierce, resolute Boyse (Mia Goth) hangs on to her bodily autonomy even as that collapsar awaits them all.
There’s a deep hopelessness at the heart of this film, and it resonates. For anyone continually horrified by the inescapable hatred and cruelty driving so much of the planet, this is the kind of outer-space experience that fits the world we’re living in currently. Respect is due Pattinson for continuing to use his international box-office cachet to get films by the most fascinating of auteurs made, and especially for something as violent, gory and unforgettable as this. If you ever wanted a film to get at the morality of raising children in hopeless spaces, well, this is certainly for you.
Denis is no stranger to the outré, having helped define the New French Extremity with 2000’s Trouble Every Day. But here she digs deeply into what human nature means — and what human nature does. Removed from the 35 mm earthbound moments that we see, thrust into the void as the ultimate control for an experiment we can’t understand, High Life is the razor-sharp digital evidence of violent, occasionally caring, possessive, grotesque psychotic apes with delusions of grandeur in the face of the universe. This film gives voice to the scream within.
