High Life Distorts Space and Love Into Something Both Beautiful and Confounding
At the edge of a black hole all the laws of nature break down and the great unknown stares back. Claire Denis’ High Life both reflects and mirrors this in it’s own discordant way. Thugs, losers, criminals caught in the middle of one fragmented environment and moving towards the clouds of another. An elliptical, opaque manifestation of the souls that drift in a world that has long abandoned them. Purpose projected as an illusion they convince themselves of believing in.
Denis utilises time as a shadow over the story. It’s malleability altering initial perspective as time jumps back and forth without ever drawing attention to it. It orbits around Robert Pattinson’s burnt out turn as criminal, and now father, Monte. At the edge of the galaxy, running from his misdeeds, knowing full well he can never escape it, and yet discovering a sliver of hope in the inky blackness, looking after a child born on the ship. A miracle in plain sight.
The film sheds narrative and character threads repeatedly before regenerating them in subtle ways. An echo of what has come before. Birth and death a clear through line. The whispers of Tarkovsky and Kubrick filter through each frame, but Denis has a primal roar that she unleashes sporadically that makes the film grimier and bloodier than those influences. It’s this convergence of the cosmic and the sexual that threatens to bury the story. A towering construct that can only be seen in parts, never able to grasp the full gravity of what it is.
Stuck in the shoe box ship, Pattinson softly pads around the halls of what is essentially a prison, forlorn and yet not quite broken. As mesmerizing as watching the stars slip away into a distant ball of light. Astounding and yet distant. The other volunteers on the ship are all these distorted versions of human flaws, showing that no matter where we are in the universe, we are never far from what makes us imperfect.
High Life is blessed with a kaleidoscopic array of images, with Denis being resolutely sparing when allowing them to emerge. The event horizon, the ship’s garden that looks to be drenched in natural sunlight, a flashback aboard a moving train. These surges of energy that propel us through loops, awaiting a subdued, stunning final shot.
They become not the pay off but the intermission between the psychological trauma and experimentations that the crew are subjected to by a truly monstrous creature in Juliette Binoche’s Dibs. She is quiet, scarred, in control, subconsciously looking for chaos, insane and terrified of what she’s done. At some levels could all be seen as fractured parts of one, isolated human, with Monte as the sole survivor. A flitting beacon of reserved love that knows better than to assert domination.
It is as if we have picked up only scattered signals. The entirety of it lost to the stars. Grand pronouncements whittled down to the vital and dependant love between a father and a daughter, stretched over time, softly unwavering even as space folds in on itself.
