High Life
Images via A24/Youtube
High Life begins with a moment of intense vulnerability, followed immediately by a moment of immense strength. First we glimpse a garden, verdant and welcoming, before we’re ushered to a sterile room. There we realize there’s a baby alone while Monte (Robert Pattinson), her father maybe, consoles her, talking through a headset mounted within his space helmet. “Da da da,” he explains through the intercom; the baby starts to lose her shit because he’s not really there, he’s perched outside, on the surface of their basic Lego-piece of a spaceship, just barely gripped on the edge of darkness. They’re in space, one supposes, surrounded by dark, oppressive nothingness, and he can’t reach her. They’re alone.
Next, Monte empties their cryogenic storage locker of all the dead bodies of his once-fellow crew members, lifting their heavy limbs and torsos into space suits, not because it matters, but maybe just because it’s something to do to pass the time, as much a sign of respect as it is an emotional test of will. Monte looks healthy and capable, like he can withstand all that loneliness, like he and his daughter might actually make it out of this OK, whatever this is. He shuts down the locker to conserve energy; getting rid of the spacesuits might’ve just been an aesthetic choice, like he’s de-cluttering.
High Life lives inside that juxtaposition, displaying tenderness as graphically as violence and anger and incomprehensible fear, mining all that blackness surrounding its characters for as much terror as writer-director Claire Denis can afford without getting obvious about it. Jumping back in time, Denis introduces us to the people who once occupied the ship, death row convicts like Monte expunging their sentences by getting on an intergalactic prison boat on its way to a black hole to apparently “collect” its “energy,” a mission that otherwise spells utter annihilation for the passengers. And yet, though humanity’s abandoned them, no one aboard the flying metal box gives up on life. They survive by proxy, the disturbed Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche, an equally startling and woozy presence) even going so far as to conduct artificial insemination experiments on them, dropping sedation into the water supply to soften their compliance. The only one who resists—even the negotiable captain (Lars Eidinger) of the ship mewls to Dibs about how much he wants to “fuck” her, between dying from radiation poisoning care of the approaching black hole—is Monte, who, between flashbacks and his eventually teenage daughter’s (Jessie Ross) questioning, we learn first went to jail for a quick, young, savage reason. He is a man who must sublimate every primal feeling that makes him human to survive.
Pattinson, flattened and lithe, plays Monte remarkably, coiled within himself to the point that he finishes every word deep in his throat, his sentences sometimes total gibberish. He doesn’t allow much to escape his face, but behind his eyes beams something scary, as if he could suddenly, and probably will, crack. He says as much to Willow, his kid, whispering to her while she sleeps that he could easily kill them both, never wanting to hurt her but still polluting her dreams. He can’t help it, and neither can Denis, who, on her 14th film (first in English), can make an audience believe, like few other directors, that anything can happen. Madness erupts from silence and sleep, bodily fluids dripping all over and splattering throughout and saturating the psyches of these criminal blue collar astronauts, the overwhelming stickiness of the film emphasizing just how intimately Denis wants us to feel to these odd, sick fleshbags hurtling toward the edge of consciousness.