High Life

Some might describe cult director Claire Denis’s newest film as mind-bending, but mind-bruising would be a more accurate appellation. The story is set in a claustrophobic spaceship carrying a crew composed of convicts who have volunteered for a dangerous mission—investigating whether energy can be extracted from a black hole—in return for receiving sentence reductions. Two stand out: Dibs (Juliette Binoche), a creepy scientist conducting experiments on procreation in space who uses crew members as guinea pigs, and Monte (Robert Pattinson), who insists on remaining celibate, and winds up seeing to the needs of an infant he cares for obsessively while going about the business of keeping the ship operating. High Life tells its story in a fragmentary fashion, shifting the chronology randomly and keeping the narrative opaque while inviting viewers to piece together the meaning as best they can. Much of it is simply tedious, but some elements are unsettling, such as scenes dealing with what the crew undergoes in connection with the scientist’s experiments, or disturbing, as in a long and ugly sequence in which one of the women is attacked before other crew members intervene. Many deaths occur, and the sight of bodies piled up waiting to be tossed out of the airlock to drift in the void carries a kind of hallucinatory power. While some may consider High Life profound, others will find it merely obscure and dull. Optional. (F. Swietek)