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In space, no one can hear you yawn ‘High Life’ has zero gravitas
by Ryan Syrek
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MAY 9, 2019
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igh Life is basically a broody teen freshman sitting in ROBERT his very first college course, finally free to ask what PATTINSON pouts in space, as the last he feels are profound questions about sex. Writer/ remaining astronaut director Claire Denis’s talent and cinematic acumen on a ship once filled are beyond reproach, but even Aristotle has lesser with prisoners. He’s now raising a baby works, right? Her first English-only film is, sadly, a sleepy whose origins represlog seemingly content to half-postulate philosophical quansent whatever passes daries without ever doing the hard work of proposing any as a plot here. Boring measure of an answer. Were it not for the impeccable pediand nowhere near weird enough, writer/ gree of its creator, High Life’s staying power would disappear director Claire faster than the carbonation in an open can of the Denis’s first English“Champagne of beers” on a summer day. only film is a forgetMonte (Robert Pattinson) is the sole remaining astronaut table slog. on a ship once filled with criminals that was shot into outer space for a combo of research and capital punishment. Denis is likely right in assuming that welding murderous revenge onto science is likely the only way the public will ever go HAM for STEM. Monte does have company: a baby. Discovering how this baby came to be is the crux of what passes as a plot. It involves a disgraced doctor who slaughtered her family (Juliette Binoche), a steelwilled female prisoner (Mia Goth), loads of pulse-pounding gardening and a self-pleasure room so vile, E.L. James thinks it doth protest too much. High Life seizes from the past to the present and back again without ever even accidentally generating suspense. Instead, the whole thing is a journey to a black hole, a metaphorical bellybutton that makes all the navel-gazing quite literal. Honestly, High Life should have been weirder. From the clunky rationale for why the ship has gravity to the tamest possible event horizon encounter, nothing about the film feels as dreamlike or hallucinatory as would be warranted. It’s mostly just Pattinson pouting, intermittently interrupted by sexual assault and dog murder. If that sounds unpleasant, please know there’s also the most embarrassing scene Binoche has ever filmed, and she appeared in the live-action Ghost in the Shell. Pattinson acquits himself just fine, although he’s never asked to do much more than frown. Denis seemingly asks more of her audience than she did of her performers. If this is meant to engage issues about morality, the human capacity for survival or whether procreation is a substitute for purpose, those debates all happen between the viewers and themselves. High Life is a Philosophy 101 term paper, where every sentence ends in a question mark. The collision between weird, obtuse art and science-fiction can make for provocative, exciting cinema. High Life is not any of that. Instead, it is a leaden, posturing misfire from a renowned artist. That’s totally fine. It happens. Every rabidly positive review of the film feels like it was either written by someone who saw an entirely different version or, far more likely, by someone replacing High Life’s actual banality with the spirited creativity they expected. This review first appeared in The Reader of Omaha, Nebraska. I
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