High Life

Starting with an astronaut alone on a spaceship with a baby girl, most of High Life is flashbacks on how we got here. You shouldn't go into a Claire Denis film expecting everything to make sense. Though you should expect the camera to spend a lot of time watching the actors doing stuff. But in High Life we eventually get most of the back story. Scientists have come up with a way to transfer some of the energy from a black hole to earth. Unfortunately, the trip to the nearest suitable black hole to set up the system will take a long time, effectively making it a one-way trip. So a crew of convicts serving long sentences is recruited, including a disproportionally large number of sociopaths. There is not much to do in space and the doctor (Juliette Binoche) is experimenting with artificial insemination when she isn't playing with her long hair and flirting with the gardener, Monte (Robert Pattinson). Sex and the lack of sex is an underlying theme in this movie which is more about the crew than the mission.

Which unfortunately means once Denis has killed off almost all the crew and our curiosity about the past has been satisfied there is very little material left for the final act. It feels like the writers didn't know how to finish the film and (at the risk of being lynched by fanboys and girls gnashing their dentures and waving their walking sticks at this comparison) like 2001: A Space Odyssey the plot peters out.

There is one possible further storyline for the film to explore and while it is hinted at near the end as the baby girl grows up, perhaps that idea is too extreme even for Claire Denis.

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Ian rating 2/5