There’s a black hole where the plot should be
High Life (18) Verdict: Original, but pretentious
THIS bizarre science-fiction drama from French director Claire Denis — her English-language debut — is nothing if not original.
There have been some rhapsodic early reviews, including one, understandably quoted on the posters, that urges people to see the film a second, third and fourth time.
Well, it didn’t float my spaceship at all. One viewing was more than enough.
It certainly begins arrestingly, with an astronaut (Robert Pattinson) tenderly communing with his baby daughter. It turns out that he is Monte, one of a band of Death Row convicts who have been despatched to infinity and beyond, partly to get shut of them.
But they have also been propelled into space in the hope that their epic journey towards a black hole will provide scientists back on a blighted Earth with information they need to keep humankind alive. There is a
doctor among them, dementedly played by Juliette Binoche, who was herself guilty of murder back on Earth.
Her apparent job is to build the craft’s future population by way of artificial insemination, which she does in all sorts of sneaky ways.
Monte calls her the ‘shaman of sperm’ and resists her sexual advances, so instead she gets her kicks privately, in a special room that reminded me powerfully of the ‘orgasmatron’ in Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi comedy Sleeper. Maybe that was why I found it impossible to take seriously.
The film too often tumbles from whimsy into full-bore pretentiousness, while one sickeningly violent scene in particular seems designed purely to shock, not because it moves the story along.
Pattinson, the former Twilight star, gives a strikingly committed performance, and all the cast buy admirably into Denis’s disturbing vision of the future ( which, very oddly indeed, includes the space travellers watching grainy old TV footage of an international rugby match at Murrayfield).
Whether audiences will another matter.