Claire Denis Sends Inmates to Space in ‘High Life’, A Review

The latest film from French auteur Claire Denis (Beau Travail) is the intimate, unsettling, and introspective space drama that Dark Phoenix aspired to be, but without the crippling expectations of franchise performance and corporate mishandlings. Easily the most mainstream of Denis’ previous works, she succeeds where so many foreign arthouse filmmakers fail in making “Hollywood-Indie,” English-languages film by delicately placing the speculative fiction elements and special effects squarely at the service of the story and its characters. THE SETUP

High Life takes place in a not-so-distant future or parallel reality to our own in which prisoners with life sentences are offered the opportunity to join black hole expeditions in space in exchange for their freedom.  The Catch-22 that only a few of the admits can accept, however, is that due to the difference of space time and the distance of their journey, they will probably never return to Earth; and if they did, anyone they ever loved would most likely be dead. The inmates are under the sole supervision of Dibbs, a geneticist but also an inmate as a result of killing her husband and children. Obsessed with recreation of life in order to prolong the changes of the missions survival, she coerces the male inmates with drugs in order to take their semen samples. Monte, played by Robert Pattinson, busies himself with the garden and duties on the ship, refusing any and all carnal pleasures or reliefs.  Gradually, Dibbs’ obsession wi…