Critics use the adjective “elliptical” a lot for Claire Denis’s movies. From a Greek word meaning “to fall short,” ellipses are the dot dot dot indicating a word left out from a sentence. The elliptical filmmaker is one who leaves things out. From her first feature Chocolat (1988) to her new movie High Life, the 73-year-old Denis has made films with enormous holes in them, in order to draw attention to what is left behind.



High Life is Denis’s first movie in English, packed with bona fide stars: André Benjamin (alias André 3000), Robert Pattinson, Mia Goth, Juliette Binoche. In synopsis, it sounds like a fairly straightforward sci-fi offering. A group of death-row felons hurtle through space toward a black hole, ostensibly for the purposes of harvesting its energy. The catch is that they must cooperate with sexual experiments performed on them by the ship’s doctor, herself also a criminal.

But High Life is no blockbuster space romp. It is a slow-paced, speculative flick working within the rich tradition that began with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and was cemented in Andrei Tarkovsky’s great philosophical achievement, 1972’s Solaris. Like those films, Denis’s new picture begins ambiguously—a wet gourd in a garden, a shoe nearby—before unfurling a psychological drama that never lets you forget the cruel void just outside the spaceship window.

Mia Goth as Boyse. 2018 ALCATRAZ FILMS – PANDORA FILM PRODUKTION

The wet gourd, we learn, is growing in a special room on the ship dedicated to earth’s flora. In the movie’s beginning, the only remaining passengers are Monte (Pattinson) and his baby daughter. Everybody else is dead. He cares for her sweetly, the camera lingering on the baby’s fat wrists, Pattinson’s rock-hewn face. The only things left on this ship are love and the memory of death.

The rest of the movie plays out in disturbing and nonlinear flashback, showing us impressionistic details from earth (a dog, a friend, a train) and scenes from the ship when it was full of people. The criminals are young, attractive people, of a mix of ethnicities. They wear uniforms and sleep in bunks. Over them Dr. Dibs (Binoche) wields total control. She drugs them to wake and to sleep. She has the male inmates give her their sperm, which she injects into the female inmates in the hope of producing a fetus for her futuristic incubator (her “plastic pussy,” according to one character). She also violates the inmates while they sleep, and plays with their lives uncaringly. The first character to die, for example, does so in childbirth.