X
- 2019
- R
- A24
- 1 h 53 m
- 2019
- R
- A24
- 1 h 53 m
Summary Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his baby daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to deep space. The crew—death-row inmates led by a doctor (Juliette Binoche) with sinister motives—has vanished. As the mystery of what happened onboard the ship is unraveled, father and daughter must rely on each other to survive as t...
Directed By: Claire Denis
- 2019
- R
- A24
- 1 h 53 m
- 2019
- R
- A24
- 1 h 53 m
High Life
78
6.3
Where to Watch
Summary Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his baby daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to deep space. The crew—death-row inmates led by a doctor (Juliette Binoche) with sinister motives—has vanished. As the mystery of what happened onboard the ship is unraveled, father and daughter must rely on each other to survive as t...
Directed By: Claire Denis
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 42 Critic Reviews
78
83% Positive
35 Reviews
35 Reviews
14% Mixed
6 Reviews
6 Reviews
2% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 42 Critic Reviews
78
83% Positive
35 Reviews
35 Reviews
14% Mixed
6 Reviews
6 Reviews
2% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
The lure of intense mystery that beguiles you into trying to solve it again and again; the transference of an intoxication that makes you feel physically different afterwards. It sounds hyperbolic to describe art as having such power, but surely the reason we care about art is a belief that such power exists. High Life is too layered, too ambiguous, too potent to be about any one thing.
High Life offers an uncompromising mind-bender of a deep space journey through destructive desire, faith, trust and the instincts for good and bad that make us merely human.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 155 User Ratings
6.3
55% Positive
85 Ratings
85 Ratings
24% Mixed
37 Ratings
37 Ratings
21% Negative
33 Ratings
33 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 155 User Ratings
6.3
55% Positive
85 Ratings
85 Ratings
24% Mixed
37 Ratings
37 Ratings
21% Negative
33 Ratings
33 Ratings
Brilliant film from start to finish, highly recommend. Many negative reviews on this site actually disregard plot structure and information that was provided in the film, and to those people who cant interpret based on basic information, I feel sorry for you. Highly recommend this film.
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Transfixing? A bore? I cannot answer for you. If think Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” is as far out as you go with this sort of setting, this is not your thing. Undeniably, though, High Life is an organic achievement.
A sci-fi thriller starring Robert Pattinson suggests that Claire Denis has gone all mainstream. But High Life is the filmmaker at her most dark, a mesmerising, patience-testing, violent exploration in the darkest reaches of outer and inner space.
Never has space travel looked so sordid, debased, mean-spirited, or crummy, qualities intensified by the (intentionally) ugliest cinematography ever — except for the close-ups of faces — from the great Agnès Godard, Denis’s longtime collaborator. But seldom has space travel served as such an eloquent and tragic representation of the human condition.
Even ardent Pattinson fandom won’t be enough to convert mainstream American audiences to the art-house director’s dark outlook and elliptical style.
An unwatchable sci-fi creep-out by eccentric French director Claire Denis, it stars Robert Pattinson, who devotes himself these days to art films in an effort to live down his reputation as a sexy television vampire.
So absorbing as a black hole, so is this space oddity that failed to doom. With context sexual and existential (that would love Kubrick), and assorted questions that remain with no answer. A small caliber sci-fi movie hard to forget.
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A group of death row co-eds volunteer for a scientific suicide mission in space led by an artificial insemination obsessed doctor (also an inmate) to collect energy from a black hole and are forbidden to have sex with one another. Unsurprisingly, the ship's specialized **** chamber can't keep them satisfied and the resulting sexual frustration mixed with the unethical experimentation taking place and the whole crew realizing that "hey, this situation ****, I hate everyone around me, and we're never going home" leads to a breaking point full of murder, ****, and self-inflicted loss of life. What is surprising though is that the movie doesn't get interesting until all this stuff passes and we're left with the sole survivor taking care of an infant.
The concept of a science-fiction movie about a man raising a child by himself in the total isolation of the final frontier with no hope of outside support is a compelling one and I wish that had been the focus of the movie rather than all the other stuff. Instead it's just used as a means of delivering a message about beauty blooming from tragic circumstances. Which kind of works, but a lot of its power is robbed by the story being told in a nonlinear manner. High Life literally opens with the protagonist already struggling to be a parent on his own and makes it very clear that everyone else has died beforehand. So when the narrative starts playing catch-up to show us how he arrived in this position, not only is there no tension in the proceedings because we know every character's ultimate fate, but worse it all feels rather pointless as we were informed what the big takeaway is supposed to be at the very beginning.
These missteps mean that the plot isn't able to generate the level of interest it should, which leaves the film to rely on its visuals and imagery to try and captivate. There are certainly moments that will capture your attention and stick with you long after the credits have rolled due to how graphic they are. However, High Life has a problem here as well in that there simply aren't enough of them. The most memorable of the bunch, a grandiose display of self-pleasure, takes place relatively early on making the rest of the running-time a bit of a slog as most of what follows isn't nearly as shocking or disgusting as it thinks it is outside of the regular appearance of semen onscreen. You also have to consider that all of this is taking place to convey the horrible things humans are capable of when horny, frustrated, and have no release. Not exactly original territory. Where it succeeds the most is on the design of the ship itself. The drab, almost rundown looking corridors and bunking really reflect the hopelessness of these criminals venture, with the garden offering the only source of happiness or potential in the surroundings in the same way the baby does in the lead's life.
I can see why this has received so much praise, and I definitely appreciate what is was attempting to do, but it fell short for me in a few key ways. The primary one being how it was told. Had things of played out in chronological order I wouldn't have been so disappointed. Given the feature's fixation on carnal desire, I think the best way to describe it would be to say it shoots its load too early. The climax occurs at the start rather than after a steady build-up of pleasure, preventing what little sentimentality there is at the conclusion from being able to satisfy.
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There was something missing from this movie for me. It was a little disappointing, and I didn't get exactly what I needed from this. I did enjoy the movie, and didn't really feel bored even though there wasn't much going on. But I feel like there was a lot of missed opportunities here. The cast was great, the visuals were great, but I feel like this movie had a great opportunity to be suspenseful, and completely threw that opportunity away. If this movie had had a little bit more of those mystery/suspense/horror elements I think it would have been a lot more impactful and would have stuck with me for awhile after.
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High Life features a somewhat interesting premise and is ultimately bogged down by many indie film clichés that unfortunately all work out in the worst possible way.
The most aggravating thing about the film by auteuresse Claire Denis is its sluggish pace, which shows in many different ways: Scenes continue for too long and are dragged out by drowsy, listless performances. Given, the sedation of the space ships inmates is a valid plot point that is addressed and in context makes some sense, but is it really worth it if that means that each scene feels like you are watching it in slow-motion? The pace is further disturbed and hindered by completely needless time-jumps, that add next to nothing to building tension or creating an intriguing narrative and instead make the film move even slower. One of the most painful scenes is happening about two thirds into the movie, when Juliette Binoche's wicked fertility doctor increases the sedative in the crew's water and the acting therefore becoming even more slurred and bored from there on.
The sound mix does not help as it decides to make the often mumbled, whispered lines often inaudible, even though there is barely a score to hide them behind. It is a very regrettable choice for what interesting bits High Life has to offer, they are almost entirely delivered in the odd, meaningful, ominous line here and there and very rarely presented visually.
Which introduces the next problem: The film is not a looker at all, which is a shame considering what other low-budget movies managed to get out of a sci-fi setting by actually using creativity and craftsmanship to counter the lack of grandiose CGI (e.g. Prospect) . But High Life features one of the least inspired and frankly ugliest set designs in the recent years, with a ship looking like a rusty Lego brick, suits that seem to have been fabricated by sewing rags together and sparse use of tech that looks like it was just ordered off Amazon for a few hundred bucks and thrown in the shot entirely without dressing up. Granted, the rag-tag ambience is a deliberate choice, but how unique and interesting are the gadgets that the inmates in the movie are clobbering together going to look, if everything else looks the same?
Apart from shortcomings stemming from the limited budget and the poor artistic choices, what eventually undoes High Life in its entirety is the nonsensical plot, that deals with prisoners being shot into space to somehow retrieve information on alternative energy sources from a black hole. How? We don't really get to know. Why these specific people? We don't get to know that either. And in combination with a ludicrous plot about artificial insemination that is forced upon the inmates by yet another inmate the film just crumbles apart. The power structure within the ship's crew makes no sense and should fall apart from the get-go. For unexplained reasons everybody maintains the cruel and absurd goings-on until the logical meltdown is somehow played as a cathartic happening.
The best thing about High Life are the performances by Binoche, whose disturbed and broken doctor persona keeps you interested as you never quite know how tight her power-grip is and how far she can and is willing to push her cruel experiments. Pattinson is solid, if a bit one-dimensional. The breakout performance is clearly delivered by Mia Goth who plays Boyse, a fretful but fierce wild-child who makes fickle alliances with different characters to benefit her goals that - besides her survival - are never fully formed.
In the end, High Life is utterly unenjoyable and never manages to lift the interesting premise above what it is - instead showing shortcomings on almost all levels, from narration to direction.
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(Mauro Lanari)
"Into this world we're thrown / Like a dog without a bone" (The Doors, "Riders on the Storm", 1971). Being thrown into the black hole of existence: the most treated topic in history and emphasized by Claire Denis with a crass anthropocentrism, avoiding almost any trace of pietas and drawing on the maximum of rhetoric (rarefied rhythm, decadent atmospheres, deafening silences, a couple of brutal scenes, disjointed narration).
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Production Company
Alcatraz Films,
Andrew Lauren Productions,
Arte France Cinéma,
BFI Film Fund,
Canal+,
Ciné+,
Madants,
Pandora Filmproduktion,
Polski Instytut Sztuki Filmowej,
The Apocalypse Films Company,
Wild Bunch,
Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF)
Release Date Apr 5, 2019
Duration 1 h 53 m
Rating R
Tagline Oblivion awaits.
Awards
International Online Cinema Awards (INOCA)
• 8 Nominations
International Cinephile Society Awards
• 1 Win & 3 Nominations
Dublin Film Critics Circle Awards
• 3 Nominations
