High Life review – Robert

Pattinson heads to infinity and

beyond
5 / 5 stars5 out of 5 stars.

An astronaut on an 1. ………………… to a distant black hole faces the challenges of

parenting – and existential panic – in Claire Denis’ superbly eerie, mysterious
space drama

Claire Denis’s deep-space trauma High Life is an Old Testament parable catapulted
forward 2. ………………… the 23rd century, a primal scene in a pressurised cabin of
sci-fi pessimism, suppressed horror and denied panic. 3. ………………… if in a
recurring dream, Denis brings us repeatedly to the image of a cream-panelled
spaceship corridor that curves sharply around to the right; the area is at first
pristine and then, as the years 4. ………………… by, shabby and derelict, stained with
what may be body fluids. And what is around that corner?

This is a bizarre new creationist myth for those of us 5. ………………… ever wondered
in childhood, and then forgot to wonder, about the taboo-breaking involved in
propagating a race from just two people in the Garden of Eden, or two species
representatives in the ark. It is also a tale of imperial 6. ………………… and sexual
beings 7. ………………… pressure, just as in earlier Denis movies such as Beau
Travail (1999) or White Material (2009); this is written by Denis with Jean-Pol
Fargeau, Geoff Cox and Nick Laird, 8. ………………… with luminous mystery by
cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, with an eerie musical 9. ………………… by Stuart
Staples of the band Tindersticks.

At its centre is Monte, 10. ………………… by Robert Pattinson, who is evidently all
alone on a spaceship that exterior shots reveal to be shaped entirely without the
elegant streamlined curves of a craft designed for purposeful travel. It is huge and
rectangular, suspended in space like a clunking great container unit full of rubbish.
11. …………………, Monte isn’t entirely alone. He has a tiny infant with him called
Willow, 12. ………………… he tends to and talks to conscientiously but unsmilingly.

Denis creates a 13. ………………… unreadable dynamic right here. There is something
adorable in the trusting baby and the adult’s care, and yet nothing else around
speaks of gentleness and love. It’s not at all clear, in 14. …………………, that Monte is
capable of love, or if events have not rendered the emotion of love obsolete.

Monte talks of recycling the child’s excrement, and the film reflects that the crew
members themselves are recycled waste: marginal, transgressive figures who have
been 15. ………………… to work in 16. ………………… may be the service of mankind, or
some mendacious or desperate plan born of humanity’s fear of its own impending
extinction.
Flashbacks 17. ………………… that Monte was once one of an extensive crew, an anti-
community of former prisoners 18. ………………… whom there is unbearable tension.
There appears to be no captain or leader in any traditional sense; the nearest thing
to an authority figure is the white-coated Dibs, played by Juliette Binoche, someone
with medical training.

Like all the other desperate souls on 19. …………………, Dibs has a past and is 20.
………………… to redeem that past by taking part in this experimental space mission:
to harvest the energy of a distant black hole and bring it back to Earth. But the
journey there will be longer than any normal human lifespan, 21. ………………… the
crew members are expected to breed, to create a second or third generation that
will be in a position to deal with the black hole when the ship finally arrives.

Dibs is in charge of something called the Fuck Box (like the Orgasmatron of old),
which facilitates and manages their erotic needs, 22. ………………… these easier to
channel into procreation. (As with other Denis films, such as Let the Sunshine In,
there is an idle, subsidiary pleasure in wondering how it would be if the Binoche
part was given to Isabelle Huppert.)

The pure radioactive strangeness of High Life has something in common with
Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) in its onboard vegetable garden (23.
………………… this garden is small, and perhaps symbolically represented). And
there is something of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) in the glitzy, alienated
weightlessness of everyone’s spacecraft existence being juxtaposed with the 24.
…………………-technological naturalness of Planet Earth: the soil, the streams, the
grasses, those wild textures and smeared surfaces so 25. ………………… from the
controlled metallic gleam of that incarceration way out in space. It is here 26.
………………… there will be almost limitless violence, a psycho-chemical reaction, a
silent detonation, from 27. ………………… some kind of enigmatic new hope, or
anticipation for the future is 28. ………………… emerge.

As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly

powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated
in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film
was 29. ………………….