This is only my third Denis, the others being White Material and Bastards, but her work strikes me as fraudulent. I'll reserve judgment on her earlier major works (if I ever watch them), but her style seems wholly conventional (and pretty sloppy in this case) and the ideas of her films are downright stupid. High Life traffics in the same unsophisticated fascination with sexuality and violence shared by other art house brands like Noe, Breillat, Refn, and Haneke, filmmakers who are equally described as "exploring" or "interrogating" ideas when in reality they're depicting a set of circular logics grounded in an unshakable essentialism. Denis' vision of humanity is quite simple and renders a tired French philosophical binary of masculinity (as biologically male) and femininity (as biologically female) and seems only capable of domination and submission. Rape, coercion, lust, and the ole biological clock as the defining characteristics of humanity are more 2-dimensional than the stock characters of the science fiction genre films that this cribs while fervently denying. Denis herself said its not sci-fi; elevated science fiction perhaps, a code name for crap. I guess an argument could be made that High Life is a film about struggling to overcome human biology, but by the end of this turd I was mostly playing with my cats. My read of its boneheaded, Irigaray-lite essentialism is less one of being triggered and more a criticism of (a) how intellectually dead this film is and (b) how surprised I am at the reception of Denis as an interrogator of concepts when she in fact presents them as predetermined. In interviews surrounding High Life and Let the Sunshine in, Denis comes off as a nihilist, steeped in the kind of declarative bravado of the French intellectual class and the transgression-as-real politik of the alt-right. Her dismissal of the Harvey Weinstein scandal as "boring" is steeped in the sort of what-aboutism that usually comes with a Pepe meme, reducing it to a "bourgeois" argument in comparison to the violence of Africa and the Middle East, as if the two cannot be held simultaneously instead of constructing them as mutually exclusive. I don't know if Denis is Marxist, but this is pretty classic Marxist provocation in denying any activism that isn't strictly about class (not all Marxists, to be clear). In those same interviews she says, "In the west, the real problem is the class struggle; that’s where all the sexual problems come from.” Imagine being so simple. Class struggle is central, the epicenter of liberation, but the ways in which some leftists dismiss the complexity of sexuality and identity formation as bourgeois concerns reveals the simplicity of their fundamentalism. Again, these concerns are not mutually exclusive. Beware philosophers who make mathematical charts and hierarchies of import. But in a separate interview Denis jokes about not having to be raped in order to fund her films and that maybe she should have had to go to a hotel room with a Weinstein to get more money. So is sexual violence something she's concerned with, or was this just an opportunity to be reductionist about vague and generic anti-American sentiments? Who cares. Denis is not a maverick or a provocateur, but a diaper baby whose greatest annoyance is being contextualized within a larger, collective discourse that she can't control.