High Life

HIGH LIFE   **

Claire Denis

2018

IDEA:  In exchange for their sentence, death row inmates travel aboard a spacecraft heading toward a black hole. On board, they are used as guinea pigs for an experiment in reproducing life in space.

BLURB:  If it wasn’t clear from many of her previous films, Claire Denis is kind of obsessed with bodily transgression. In High Life, this manifests in exaggeratedly literal and multiple forms of abjection, as the film’s criminals come to occupy the same anti-symbolic space as their myriad secretions: outside of social and corporeal order. Denis focuses first on the baby, agonizingly evoking its undeveloped motor control, to hammer home the idea of a pre-socialized and thus pre-lingual body, not yet learned of boundaries. Robert Pattinson’s reformed celibate convict coos to her about proper hygiene to reinforce the social rules she will hopefully grow to observe. Denis then turns to the other convicts, who variously regress to a borderless state not unlike the baby, and who, unable to control their deepest primal urges, succumb to base animal behavior. The filmmaker captures their transgressions in her characteristic fragmentary approach, depicting violent, violating confrontations as sudden jolts between scenes of lugubrious rumination. But what does High Life ruminate on, exactly? Entropy, the resilience and/or futility of life? These ideas float around like abrasive stardust and occasionally gather magnetic affective force, but Denis loses their weight as she gravitates toward risible scatological obsessions. Yes, criminals are treated like excrement, and yes, that metaphorical excrement can disrupt the boundaries we create to separate us from a realm of nothingness. High Life’s merging of the primordial with the sci-fi is sometimes entrancing, but mostly just banal.