Lost in space in the most spellbinding way
High Life 18 cert, 113 min ★★★★★ Dir Claire Denis
Starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, Mia Goth, Lars Eidinger, Agata Buzek
When films venture into deep space, it’s usually for some life-or-death reason, or why else brave such icy hostility? High Life, the first English-language feature by the redoubtable Claire Denis, starts from a very different place: cosmic indifference. The title appears over a shot of six floating bodies, cascading through space but hardly beholden to its physical laws. They are members of a nine-strong crew, death row convicts banished from Earth to perform tests – to investigate the impacts on human life of prolonged space travel, proximity to black holes, and so on.
This crude vessel’s crew serve out their sentences simply by surviving, using bodily waste as a fuel source, and in most cases submitting to reproductive experiments tracked by a doctor called Dibs (Juliette Binoche). It’s an unusually low-tech vision, as if no one were willing to pack these deplorables off in a state-of-the-art craft, so we gave them a kamikaze one instead, patched together from Bakelite and milk cartons.
The navigation console is a quaint light show, more primitive than anything dreamt up in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even space itself is seemingly switched off – the bodies dumped into it, or in one case stepping voluntarily,
float in serene slow motion without becoming the usual bloody popsicles.
Before we discover how the crew whittled itself down to a father called Monte (Robert Pattinson) and a baby called Willow, we spend quality time with these two, tenderly adrift in the ship’s corridors, in gorgeous, tactile scenes, magically played by Pattinson, who builds a cocoon of serenity for his daughter’s sake that’s touching and tragic, given the hopeless future stretching before them.
Even with a full complement, the space travel of Denis’s imagination is wanting in camaraderie, save for a few exchanges between Monte and the ship’s gardener, Tcherny (a sorrowful André Benjamin). The ship is a prison – literally so, but also a prison of impulse, especially when it comes to sex. Every look and touch seems charged with it. We don’t find out what crimes the crew committed, save in the cases of Dibs and Monte, both guilty of gruesome murders.
The film’s most notorious set is a kind of masturbation chamber, where crewmates individually enter and writhe on chrome hardware to get their rocks off. Binoche lets rip inside this kinky variant on a Portaloo, letting her long brunette hair caress her body from head to toe. It’s a blissed-out trance of a one-woman sex scene.
High Life is lax with story progression or moments of crisis, but its pessimism is darkly profound. Yet there are moments in this abyss that prove life is worth living – deterring Monte (and us) from pulling the plug quite yet. We witness, for instance, Willow’s first steps, fumbling miracles, with her father entranced. Denis has made a spellbindingly mysterious object – as nonsensical as existence, maybe, until you give it a quarter-turn, and look again.