High Life

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Cast & Crew

Robert Pattinson

Monte

Juliette Binoche

Dr. Dibs

André Benjamin

Tcherny

Mia Goth

Boyse

Lars Eidinger

Chandra

Agata Buzek

Nansen

Ewan Mitchell

Ettore

Scarlett Lindsey

Willow -- Baby

Jessie Ross

Willow -- Teenager

Claire Denis

Director

Claire Denis

Screenwriter

Geoff Cox

Screenwriter

Jean-Pol Fargeau

Screenwriter

Oliver Dungey

Producer

Laurence Clerc

Producer

Olivier Thery-Lapiney

Producer

Christoph Friedel

Producer

D.J. Gugenheim

Producer

Andrew Lauren

Producer

Klaudia Śmieja

Producer

Claudia Steffen

Producer

Yorick Le Saux

Cinematographer

Tomasz Naumiuk

Cinematographer

Guy Lecorne

Film Editing

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Critic Reviews for High Life

Audience Reviews for High Life

• Nov 24, 2020

  The most unerotic erotic space movie of all time. Having just recently watched the excellent 2018 low budget sci-fi flick "Prospect", I then watched Robert Pattinson's "High Life," another low-budget sci-fi movie released the same year. It was an interesting juxtaposition. As such, this review may be biased in comparison which really isn't fair because they are two very different movies. "Highlife" is an artsy attempt at a claustrophobic erotic drama set in a junky spaceship in deep space. I'm not a fan of artsy movies so I won't belabor my issues here as my opinion on what is good art I will leave to other critics. Death row inmates are used as fertility lab rats as the super horny doctor (Juliet Pinoche) does weird experiments on them (something with sperm and fertilization or maybe not?!?). And then there's the cool looking black hole that is not low budget (similar effect as Instersteallar's black hole) that apparently can provide alternative energy to humanity. I won't spoil the ending but frankly it leaves you unsatisfied. Whether that is the movie's purpose or just a poorly handled ending, it still left me not wanting more.
  

  mark b Super Reviewer
• Jul 26, 2019

  Think of this as unscience-fiction, with Denis mostly rejecting tropes and technobabble for something far stranger.
  

  Super Reviewer
• Jul 24, 2019

  The one movie more of my friends have cited as their favorite of 2019, besides Avengers, is a small little indie that left theaters as quickly as it arrived. High Life is a challenging, provocative science-fiction movie by French director Claire Denis (Let the Sunshine In), making her English-language debut. High Life is set in the deep of space with a crew made up of prisoners serving life sentences. We follow Monte (Robert Pattinson) along with a baby and we're left to determine how they got here. The following two hours will explore the hazards of space, the fragility of man, and the weirdness of French people. I knew I was in troubled territory when the movie spends a whopping 18 minutes (18!) to set up that Pattinson is alone in space with a baby and everyone else on his crew is dead. I understand establishing a mood, a day-to-day sense of the grunt work operations this guy has to do to stay alive, but this is simply excessive latitude to convey the same information. It was a bad indication of what was to come. Fortunately, the movie picks up as we transition into the flashback of life with the crew and the growing anxiety and tensions that would seal their doom. I was waiting for some taut tension. We know they're all prisoners serving life sentences so I also expected some combustibility with them trapped, together, for years on end, and subjected to strange experiments. I expected some prisoners to lose their minds into madness and others to be distraught and others to be excitable. What I wasn't expecting was that everybody would simply be masturbating the whole time or raping each other. There's a hard turn into explicit sexuality and the movie starts to resemble a more insidious soft-core flick. There's a masturbation room though its overall importance escapes me. Juliette Binoche's character is performing fertility experiments and has her eyes set on a specific DNA combination. This leads to some bizarre and almost unintentionally hilarious moments where she stalks the halls with syringes of sperm. The psycho-sexual aspect of the movie feels like it should be more important but Denis doesn't seem to be articulating its importance, only using it as an excuse for characters to act on their carnality as if this is commentary on the human condition alone and without context. "Sex is the only freedom," she says, as if this is a unique observation. I suppose there's the concept that these people have been disposed of by larger society, jettisoned out of the solar system in the name of scientific discovery but perhaps just as a means of cleaning out Earth's prison population. These people are all atoning for something, or so we're told, and you would think the existential solitude and knowledge that they will likely never see Earth again would be a prime starting point for some really interesting and introspective examinations on these people, their conceptions of themselves, and their actions and place in the universe. We get little glimpses of this but mostly the other characters are kept at an unreachable distance; they're strangers to the audience, so when they start being dispatched one-by-one the emotional response is simply that of indifference. Another character we never got much of a sense of is gone. Oh well. The characterization by Denis and her four other co-writers (five people wrote this!) keeps everyone underdeveloped with the exception of our protagonist, who seems to be the model for the character journey the movie was setting up. He's trying to live a life free from urges but ultimately comes into care of a little baby. Their father/daughter survival could be the stuff of great drama that pushes his character into uncharted realms. Unfortunately, once Denis has killed off everyone the movie zips ahead to the baby now as a teenager and then it abruptly ends in what seems like a suicidal confrontation of oblivion that could have just as likely happened at any point. It feels only so much an ending because there are credits afterwards. This is going to be much more metaphorical and subtextual science fiction, so I was waiting for the eventual themes to emerge, and I just kept waiting. The first 18 minutes is watching Pattinson play take-your-daughter-to-work-day on the space ship. The next hour is almost a mad scientist drama with a bunch of expendable characters meeting unfortunate ends. There's also a lot of sexual violence here. Once we get caught up in the timeline, the last twenty minutes is pretty mundane until one final fateful decision that we established earlier is the physical equivalent of suicide. That's about it. It feels like pieces of more meaningful ideas and conversations are left as scattered detritus, demanding that an audience not just put the pieces together but also project their own meaning onto that puzzle. I don't mind a movie that makes me work but there's a difference between being ambiguous and being empty and vague. I don't know what Denis and her movie is trying to say and it's generally hard to follow when we don't get to know people and situations before jumping around in time. There's definitely a vision here, but to what? High Life often looks gorgeous, with large swaths bathed in moody lighting and artfully styled shot compositions. A masturbatory "dance" into something dream-like feels like what would happen if David Lynch tried his hand at erotica. The performances are rather blank as if Denis had precious little to explain about their characters. There's a stretch where they're all highly sedated as well, which only makes them seem like slightly sleepier versions of who we have seen up to this point. Pattinson has really impressed me with his recent indie output working with eclectic artists, especially his live wire performance in 2017's Good Time as a hapless criminal trying to get out of an increasing mess. Pattinson burrows into his character's monastic aim in an attempt to tap into something deeper. It just isn't there, so he looks longingly at the stars, thinks furtively about his past, and goes through his routine. These people too often feel like vacant shells of human beings, zombies walking the corridors in habit. The only other actor worth noting is Binoche (Ghost in the Shell) who gives it her all, especially during a masturbatory sequence that reminded me of a riding bull. Get ready for lots of extreme closeups of her pubic bone as well. High Life feels like Annihilation in space but even lacking that movie's attuned sense of purpose about mankind's relationship with nature and its general indifference to us. It fails to come together for me into something more cohesive or engaging or just even understandable. This is operating more on a metaphorical level than a hard science level, though the asides with black holes are depicted with intelligence. Mostly I was watching the movie and I kept waiting for the actual movie to kick in. There's a dispirited collection of ideas and images and a general lack of hurry to get around to saying little with clarity. It's frustrating because the movie has so much potential with its premise and setting and different narrative pieces, but ultimately it feels too lost in space when it comes to larger meaning and substance. Nate's Grade: C
  

  nathan z Super Reviewer
• Apr 25, 2019

  Science fiction filmmaking has always been one of the more interesting genres to me, due to the fact that your stories can be filled with endless imagination. From amazing films like 2001: A Space Odyssey to even mediocre blockbusters in Interstellar, they're always filled with concepts that impress me. Even if a sci-fi movie hits theatres and has me incredibly against it by the time the credits roll, I still usually find myself pleased with the visual style or the ambition behind the story as a whole. In the case of High Life, I absolutely admired everything about this movie, but I probably won't be telling anyone to rush out and watch it. Following Monte, as he floats around in a shuttle drifting through space, he and his infant daughter try to survive, alone. With flashbacks to previous events and character interactions that explain their current situation, this is a film that begins very ambiguous, but ultimately becomes bogged down in exposition and overly complex narrative choices, that simply had me frustrated with the movie overall. The premise of the film itself and the visual style that they were able to pull off on a budget of just over 10 million dollars. I absolutely loved everything about this movie that revolved around Monte (who was played very well by Robert Pattinson) and his daughter. Their growth throughout the film and development within their characters easily felt like the most impressive aspect. As mentioned above, the flashbacks and overly explanatory sequences took me out of the film. Not to ruin what the flashbacks consist of, but it was far less interesting than the present day timeline and they balanced the present day with the past quite evenly in terms of the film's run time, which was disappointing to me. Although noticeably low-budget, this is a very nicely shot film with some very unique sci-fi visuals. I wasn't completely sucked in, because some of the sets and ways certain scenes played out felt slightly cheap in my opinion. I'm not usually someone who complains about this, because filmmaking is insanely hard to get right, especially on a low-budget, but something about the atmosphere of this movie felt slightly off to me. In the end, High Life is the pure example of a movie that's not made for everyone. Even if I loved this movie, I still wouldn't recommend it, simply because there are many things presented throughout this movie that will turn off many viewers. I admired my experience with this movie as a whole and would've given the filmmakers a round of applause if they were at the screening, but the movie just didn't click with me in the ways I had hoped for. A very solidly constructed movie that just didn't quite work for me.
  

  KJ P Super Reviewer