ROBERT PATTINSON IN CHALLENGING EXPLORATION OF HUMANITY
French filmmaker Claire Denis, one of the great living directors, has not lost her edge as she’s coasted into her 70s. Her latest film, “High Life,” which debuted last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, is as stimulating and challenging as anything she made in the ’90s.
Although here, she’s taken us not to post-Colonial West Africa or modern-day working class France, but to the outer reaches of space to drift around an ominous black hole with Robert Pattinson and a baby, daring us to piece together how they ended up in such a precarious situation.
The only thing that’s immediately clear is that they’re alone in this spaceship, which is hardly the most advanced-looking rig. Instead, it seems straight out of a 1970s film, and it is slowly shutting down.
Designed by Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, it sets a perfectly unnerving mood, and every day, Pattinson has to convince a low-tech computer that he is healthy enough and the ship is stable enough to justify systems running for another 24 hours. It’s an existential chore to say the least.
Pattinson, as a character named Monte, doesn’t have much dialogue to work with. But there is a world of fear and anxiety in his eyes as he tries to tend to the needs of the creaky old ship and the adorable little infant in his care, soothing her through a speaker as he tries to fix something outside the ship.
Although it is oddly peaceful and compelling watching Monte and this baby, Willow (played by Scarlett Lindsey), go through their routine, which requires some inventiveness to deal with some of her bodily functions, eventually you start to itch for the why and the how, and Denis doesn’t disappoint with her patient reveals.
First, you realize, there was other crew on board, but they’ve all died. Then, things get even weirder.
It seems a little strange that a Denis movie might contain spoilers, but suffice it to say that Monte was part of a strange program with inmates, all testy and violent and withdrawn in their own way, who find themselves under the watch and experimentation of Juliette Binoche’s Dr. Dibs, a witchy, serious and haunting on-board physician with some interesting sexual preferences.
This kind of moviegoing experience is totally transfixing from start to finish, but it’s also maddeningly confounding, leaving the audience always a few steps behind in discovering and integrating into this bleak microsociety. It is provocative, difficult and bleak, and leaves you with a precise feeling of despair and aloneness—just like the best of the space independents do.