High Life – first look review

Damien Chazelle might be court­ing the Acad­e­my with his space epic First Man, but Claire Denis is court­ing our eter­nal souls with the strange sci-fi that is High Life. The French film­mak­er has proven her ver­sa­til­i­ty time and time again in a career span­ning three decades, tran­scend­ing the bound­aries of genre and for­mal style to cre­ate a var­ied body of work which refus­es to con­form to any iter­a­tion of ​‘cin­e­ma rules’. She first start­ed work­ing on the script for High Life 15 years ago, and envi­sioned both Vin­cent Gal­lo and Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man as involved at var­i­ous points in her cre­ative process. It’s 2018 now, Denis’ Eng­lish-lan­guage debut is nigh, and… it’s just real­ly fuck­ing good.

Robert Pat­tin­son, com­ing off the back of two excel­lent career choic­es in Good Time and The Lost City of Z, is Monte, a crim­i­nal who vol­un­teers to take part in a mys­te­ri­ous space mis­sion to inves­ti­gate black holes as a way to avoid incar­cer­a­tion. On a ship light years away from Earth, he’s joined by a surly gang of fel­low crooks, includ­ing Boyse (Mia Goth) and Tche­my (Andre Ben­jamin, aka Outkast’s Andre 3000). The ship’s doc­tor, Dibs (Juli­ette Binoche), has her own moti­va­tions for being aboard the ship, and uses her posi­tion of rel­a­tive pow­er to car­ry out sex­u­al exper­i­ments among her cap­tive audi­ence, as they float through space, fur­ther and fur­ther from any chance of return­ing home.

To give away any more of High Life’s plot would be unfair and unnec­es­sary, as the joy of this excep­tion­al film is know­ing as lit­tle about its premise as pos­si­ble before­hand. Instead, it’s bet­ter to focus on Denis’ incred­i­ble imag­i­na­tion, which sees a ful­ly-realised world exist before our eyes. Hav­ing con­sult­ed with physi­cist and black hole expert Aurélien Bar­rau, Denis shows a real con­cern for ground­ing her sto­ry in real­i­ty, and the slight­ly ram­shackle nature of the space­craft which Monte and the crew inhab­it hints at a prov­i­dence to the sto­ry – this feels like a com­plete chap­ter that’s still part of some­thing much big­ger (and per­haps more terrifying).

Denis’ script (writ­ten with Jean-Pol Fargeau, Nick Laird and Geoff Cox) is a com­plex look at human nature and human rela­tion­ships dur­ing times of des­per­a­tion, and it’s hard to see any­one but the soul­ful Pat­tin­son as Monte, nor any­one but the bewitch­ing Binoche as the com­plex physi­cian who has the ship’s crew at her mer­cy. Sim­i­lar the efforts of pro­duc­tion design­er François-Renaud Labarthe and space­craft design­er Ola­fur Elias­son grant the film its breath-tak­ing aes­thet­ic: every­thing feels dys­func­tion­al and bro­ken down, as if the space explor­ers have been sent on a sui­cide mis­sion, grant­ed only the bare min­i­mum of equipment.

A stark con­trast from the clean whites and shiny chromes usu­al­ly found in sci-fi films, Denis works pri­mar­i­ly in reds and blues which run hot and cold across the cast. When shoot­ing bod­ies, Denis’ lens lingers over what seem to be triv­ial details (hands, arms, the curve of one’s spine) in a way that seems to high­light our human fragili­ty, con­trast­ing it to the unfor­giv­ing vast­ness of out­er space.

Com­par­isons will inevitably be made between High Life and the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, but Denis’ film feels lither, dark­er, sex­i­er. High Life is a tri­umph of sto­ry, cast­ing, pro­duc­tion design and cin­e­matog­ra­phy – it’s also a chal­leng­ing watch that will cer­tain­ly not find unan­i­mous acclaim, although Denis has nev­er been one to court ado­ra­tion, and her films are bet­ter for it. This is a twist­ed, beau­ti­ful take on space trav­el and human fail­ure. See it on the biggest screen pos­si­ble, take some time to think about it, and then go and watch it again. It’s not some­thing you can process suf­fi­cient­ly after a soli­tary viewing.