2001: A Space Odyssey, Moon, Prometheus, The Martian, Interstellar, Life, First Man, Passengers, Solaris, Alien, Apollo 13, Gravity, it is not. Claire Denis (Chocolat, Friday Night) ambitiously ventured into outer space territory, a territory she had previously not explored, and found herself with a movie that was hard to appreciate, very difficult to enjoy, and left you with a million burning questions, most of which you would never care if they were ever answered or not. I give Denis credit for ambition, just as I gave Alex Garland credit for in Annihilation, a movie that if you enjoy, you might also enjoy High Life. But much like that movie, its plausibility was tossed out the window from the start, and its uneven semblance left you looking at your watch more than it did trying to find answers.
Not much will be memorable for the 80% of filmgoers at my local showing (the only theatre in my area that chose to screen it) who didn’t walk out on this film halfway through. Ambitious? Yes, High Life was very much an ambitious movie. Recommendable? No. There is an audience out there that will enjoy this film. Still, it’s not the same audience that wanted a movie such as the fabulous Ex Machina that was similarly ambitious but much more executed. If you can embrace the weird and understand that there won’t be much of a real payoff at the end, you might like High Life. But, for most moviegoers and readers of my reviews, I’ll see this movie is a hard skip.
The first problem (and there are many) is that you will never know what it all means. For some, that will be okay. For others, it will not. I’m okay with a movie that leaves me hanging at the end, allowing me to come up with my own conclusion based on the events portrayed. But with High Life, I was confused from the start, and there was nothing to suggest that its ambiguity was anything more than what was in Denis’s mind. Hey, that’s great for her. I’m glad she was able to convert this dream sequence into a big-budget movie (I think secretly, we all wish we could do such a thing), but this incoherent mess left me disengaged from the characters and disinterested in how the film might end. I didn’t care because Denis didn’t give me a reason to care about this inconsequential story.
The second problem with this film is it needs a true protagonist. Sure, you have Monte (Robert Pattinson – The Lost City of Z, Good Time), but he’s more of the main character than a good guy. When a bunch of bad guys surround you, he becomes a bit easier to root for, but he’s not your typical protagonist in the truest sense. In the film’s first fifteen minutes, we learn that the convicted felon is the only survivor of a crew of criminals sent out to extract energy through a black hole. The group of about a dozen (male and female) is aware that this is a one-way trip but has elected to partake in this mission rather than a lifetime behind bars.
There is no real communication from this lackluster prison spaceship (heck, the thing as a botanical garden AND A sex room). Also, they are halfway through a six-year trip voyage TO the black hole, and there isn’t one scene in this film where gravity plays a part. The third problem with the film is that there is no authority. You’ve got these guinea pigs of a crew who know that they are not coming back, yet there are, and yet they behave civilly (at least that can be assumed from the first three years of the voyage that we don’t see). I mean, come on. We are all aware that this would be an anarchical society. If we can have a convicted doctor (Juliette Binoche – Chocolat, Three Colors: Blue), you could get a convicted police officer, prison guard, etc., to do the same. Yet, what would the incentive be once you are on the mission to do anything more than survive? This is a free-roaming prison, and if that is something that we are supposed to believe, then this is the nicest prison in the world, at least through the first half of the movie.
The characters outside of Monte, Dibs (Binoche), Tcherny (André Benjamin – Battle in Seattle, Four Brothers), and Chandra (Lars Eidinger – Personal Shopper) are nearly indistinguishable. Tcherny seems to be your ultimate good guy because he IS André 3000, while Chandra is your ultimate villain. It seems Dibs is on her agenda. Only Denis knows the true purpose of the mission. Still, she seems hellbent on achieving human reproduction (as well as satisfying her insatiable appetite for sex) that she mercilessly exploits the bodies of her fellow prisoners by subjecting them to a warped mix of physical confinement and psychological manipulation. All of the men, except Monte, either participate in Dib’s mandatory sperm collections or relieve themselves in the mechanical sex room-type chamber. And if, outside of the very elaborate garden, achieving sexual orgasm is the only moment of bliss on this suicide mission, then why aren’t more of the inhabitants coupling with each other? Only Denis has the answer in this extremely flat and uninteresting film.
Plot 5/10
Character Development 5/10
Character Chemistry 5/10
Acting 6/10
Screenplay 4/10
Directing 4/10
Cinematography 6/10
Sound 6/10
Hook and Reel 5/10
Universal Relevance 3/10
49%
D-
Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie
- Annihilation
- Ad Astra
- Passengers
- Prometheus
- Interstellar