Claire Denis Creates A Quietly Terrifying Voyage Into Space With High Life

High Life opens with its lead character, Monte (Robert Pattinson), doing some repairs on the exterior of the spacecraft he and his daughter are traveling in. During this process, he accidentally loses grip of a tool that proceeds to float off into the void of space. As both he and the viewer watch this tool escape his grasp, High Life's way of depicting the vastness of space is made clear. In this film, the terrifying vastness of space is treated bluntly, only towards the end of the movie do more traditional grandiose depictions of the cosmos emerge. For much of its runtime, space is depicted as something simple: endless blackness that spells doom for all that enter it. It's a terrifying domain made all the eerier by the frank way Claire Denis films space, she frames High Life's characters against this empty void with no pomp, no circumstance.



In High Life, outer space is creepy, not beautiful and the interior of the spacecraft itself isn't much better.  Inside here, Monte is one of many death row inmates who have been sent off into space as part of morally corrupt scientific experiments carried out by Dibs (Juliette Binoche). Much like how space is visually depicted as being clearly just a vacuum of misery, the terrifying nature of this location is never made subtle, everybody seems to know from the get-go that something is truly up here. The responses to this corruption vary from crew member to crew member, some, like Monte, just roll along with Dibs while others like Mink (Claire Tran) constantly rebel against Dibs. Oh, and this spaceship also contains a box where people can have sex with themselves.

Between the presence of the now iconic f*ckbox, a non-linear style of storytelling and filmmaking predominately leaning on subdued long takes, High Life is an unusual movie destined to draw divisive responses from viewers. It's one of those movies so evocatively crafted that I could totally get someone outright disliking it while still being head over heels over it myself. The very qualities I could understandably see turning off some viewers are the very traits that endeared me to this weird voyage into the cosmos. Writer/director Claire Denis (who penned the script with Jean-Pol Fargeau) is relentlessly swinging for the fences here and she creates something both distinct and unforgettable in the process.

Her ambition is especially notable in the films visuals, which produce a number of chilling images and evocative atmospheres that are seared into my mind. Right away in an opening title shot set to corpses floating in the vacuum of space, one gets how High Life will be delivering plenty of grim imagery that puts you on edge and things only get more and more pronounced from there. And then there's the imagery created in the scene where Dibs partakes in the f*ckbox, one of the few locations that allow the passengers aboard this spacecraft a chance at briefly escaping their existence. The camera angle and color palette choices in this sequence immerse you in the idea that Dibs is being detached from reality, it's like we're watching someone enter in a wholly new plane of existence. It's utterly mesmerizing.

Such a sequence is able to convey that without much in the way of dialogue or pronounced sounds from Juliette Binoche. High Life is a movie that opts for restraint whenever possible, even when it's dealing with a sequence about a character flying into a black hole. Through this stylistic choice, the way so many of their characters have resigned themselves to their fate aboard this experiment is reinforced. Characters like Mink who try and (very understandably) rebel are doomed to failure. Both the characters of High Life and the film they inhabit are quiet souls but that doesn't mean the everyday dehumanizing terrors they're accustomed to at the hands of Dibs are any less harrowing to experience.

For some, the lack of constant dialogue or bustling activity will be a drawback to High Life and thee are certain moments where the pacing does feel more plodding than contemplative for sure. But who needs constant propulsive action when a quiet shot of Mink staring down at her naked body covered in breast milk is all you need to capture the characters misery? Such a shot is incredibly haunting and serves as a perfect demonstration of how much power Denis can conjure up with her restrained style of filmmaking. The drawn-out slow-burn style of filmmaking also has the benefit of allowing one to appreciate the finer details found in the excellent production design used to bring to life the spacecraft the characters are trapped on. With High Life, you get plenty of chances to stop and smell the uneasy outer space roses which allows one to take in the meticulous filmmaking that informs this thoroughly unusual but highly well-made voyage into outer space.