'High Life': Claire Denis Makes Strange, Scary, Kinky Sci-Fi With Robert Pattinson [TIFF Review]

The filmography of Claire Denis is so admirably esoteric, running the gamut from psychological drama to war adventure to sex comedy, that the idea of her taking on science fiction has been met, in most quarters, with a collective, “Sure, why not?” And the result, “High Life,” is a notable entry in the rather grand tradition of bugfuck space movies, merging the conventions of that particular genre subset with her ongoing preoccupations.

The opening sections seem to promise something along the lines of Duncan Jones’ “Moon” or Ridley Scott’s “Alien” — an industrial, blue-collar cousin to your “Star Trek” voyages, where everything is sort of dirty and barely functional. The vessel in question appears to have only two occupants: Monte (Robert Pattinson) and the baby girl who gurgles, cries and calls for daddy as he performs ship repairs. The premise of Pattinson and this great movie baby hanging out on a spaceship for a couple of hours is frankly irresistible (their connection is unforced and convincing), but of course, there’s more to this story, first glimpsed momentary flashbacks of puzzling images, layered with a soundscape that merge the past and present. “High Life” is the kind of movie where you may spend some time puzzling over the images, trying to unlock their meaning before it’s revealed, but eventually giving up and giving yourself over.

“I’m holding up,” Monte says. ”I’ve held up. I never caved in.” But he seems unwell, physically and mentally (this, by the way, is yet another scorching Pattinson performance; he plays the character’s menace and rebellion with brio, but look at his face the first time he sees the baby). Soon enough, we’re told why he’s there, and why he’s now alone: he and several other young criminals were made guinea pigs for space travel and experimentation. “The agency made us an offer to serve science,” he explains. “Given our ages, how could we say no?” So, understandably, they eventually all start to go a little nuts – with plenty of help from Juliette Binoche in what amounts to a mad scientist role.

Denis fills her frames with disturbing and occasionally repugnant images, but she’s never cavalier or careless about them; she knows the loaded dice she’s shooting, and the effect they’ll have an audience. (The opening night crowd at TIFF included a fair number of walkouts.) And she finds fertile new visual terrain in these environs, making the dead quiet of space into its own kind of terror — it’s just a void out there, a nothing — and finding one of her all-time great images in the terrible beauty of several dead bodies in an endless freefall.

More than this I won’t reveal — there are plenty of people spoiling the story’s wild turns and images, for no good reason, on Twitter — but suffice it to say that the flashes of the past eventually take over the narrative, times passes and fresh hells are unleashed, and eventually our hero and his offspring embark on what seems a semi-suicide mission; the picture’s science is unclear, but not unconvincing, and Denis casts such a spell that the specifics don’t matter much.

“High Life” feels longer than it is, and is occasionally so squirrely that it becomes off-putting. But in spite of the aforementioned traceable connections, it’s a true original — sometimes strange, sometimes scary, sometimes kinky. It doesn’t really “work” in any conventional sense. But then again, we’re not talking about a conventional filmmaker, and thank God for that. [B]

Check out all our coverage from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival here.