Claire Denis’ dystopian sci-fi film High Life, which just hit Amazon Prime earlier this month, is a strange and brooding film that uses its setting to distill life to its most basic functions. By putting her characters into tense situations that force them all to confront their mortality in a more overt way than we would normally face, she explores the darkest sides of humanity … but it is a long, slow drag to get there, punctuated by some highly disturbing sequences.
Robert Pattinson plays Monte, the sole surviving member of an interstellar journey whose purpose becomes apparent later in the film. His only companion on the ship is a baby, the one successful child to come from the ship’s scientist’s artificial insemination program – a program that, of course, causes a lot of outrage among the rest of the crew – all of which is explained in flashbacks over the course of the film. Without spoiling too much here, the gist is that these crew members were all criminals, given the choice to go on a mission that takes them well beyond the solar system rather than face life in jail or execution. Living in such close quarters, with the added stresses of both the control of the scientist (Juliette Binoche) and her bizarre effort to breed the crew members, only increases the odds of conflict, which is graphic and violent when it comes.
Before then, however, we see much more of the quotidian lives of the crew members through flashbacks, including their work in the ship’s gardens, the favorite spot of Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), and the use of what fans of the film have called the “fuck box,” a masturbation machine used by most of the crew members but not by Monte. Denis appears to want to strip her characters down to the basics – food, sex, shelter – to dehumanize them, making it easier to follow some of them down into a bestial sort of madness that ultimately leaves all of them dead except for Monte.
I’m not sure why this film exists, though. Pattinson is excellent – he’s turned out to be quite a good actor – and does everything he can to prop this movie up, especially in the torpid first half, but by the end I certainly had no idea why Denis had taken any of us on this particular journey. What does the rising tide of violence that engulfs the crew actually tell us about people as a whole or these characters in particular? Are we just to think that once a violent criminal, always a violent criminal? Or are they driven to madness and violence by the realization that their mission can only have one possible end?
The look and feel of High Life far surpass the content of the film. The spaceship’s exterior has a barebones look by design, as Denis has said she couldn’t imagine this dystopian future country spending on anything superficial for a mission of this kind. The interior also looks stark and grim, again fitting the nature of the mission, also enhancing the general sense of dread around the story and the fatalistic outlook of the various people on the ship. There are little details around things like resource management – including, of course, how they recycle their waste products – that give the film a layer of additional realism that would have really paid off if the story were better.
In the end, though, I never got on board with High Life‘s plot. Pattinson is good, but I didn’t relate to the character, and I think Denis’ decision to tell the story via flashbacks ultimately robs the movie of any real dramatic tension. It’s an experiment, with a decent idea at its core, but the experiment doesn’t succeed.