Review: High Life
High Life is a cinematic contraption that ensnares and mesmerises. It is directed by French filmmaker Claire Denis, working in her first English-language film, and there is a sense that, whilst she is no stranger to the language of film, that there's a reassembling at play, an experimentation that transforms the familiar into something alien. It's ostensibly a science fiction film, though it's more akin to Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris by way of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin with a dollop of Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria thrown in for good measure.
The premise is simple: a mission has gone awry, resulting in Robert Pattinson's Monte living alone in an abandoned space vessel. Well, not exactly alone for there is a baby girl named Willow for whom he cares and looks after. Then there are the bodies of his fellow astronauts, whom he removes from their cryochambers, dresses in their suits, and then, one by one, disposes into space, where we observe their bodies floating in the void. It's an image full of grace, morbidity and mystery. Who are they? What happened to them? Did Monte have anything to do with it?
It turns out that Monte is one of several death row inmates who are ostensibly part of a mission to harness energy from a black hole but are, in fact, human guinea pigs for Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who declares that she is "totally devoted to reproduction." To that end, the men are mandated to donate their sperm whilst the women are ordered to offer up their eggs and bodies so that Dibs can fulfil her dream of creating a child through artificial insemination. The prisoners are strictly forbidden to have sex with one another, though they are provided with a means of sexual satisfaction in the form of the Box, a chamber featuring bondage pulleys and a silver dildo. In a film that is ripe with indelible images, the most memorable is certainly that of Dibs, her Rapunzel-length hair unbound, straddling and pleasuring herself with the dildo. Binoche, like her fellow Frenchwoman Isabelle Huppert, is an actress who embraces difficult and divisive material and she once again proves her mettle in this astonishing sequence.
As evidenced by that sequence as well as other moments involving sexual violation (whether in the form of actual rape or Dibs forcing the women to get pregnant), High Life may be contained in execution but unhinged in content, and imbued with both a Kubrickian sterility and a roiling carnality. High Life sits easily with the rest of her oeuvre in terms of its exploration of the violence that is inherent in the relationships between men and women and the often rapacious and perverse side of female sexuality, but there's an underlying and far deeper melancholy present here than in her previous works. This is a film concerned with fertility but constantly confronted with barrenness, with perpetuating life but never vanquishing death, with breaking the laws of nature but always paying the price. It may not be to everyone's taste, but Denis is to be admired for her boldness and daring.
High Life
Directed by: Claire Denis
Written by: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, Mia Goth, Lars Eidinger, Agata Buzek
