Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Monte and his daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to deep space. The crew—death-row inmates led by a doctor with sinister motives—has vanished. As the mystery of what happened onboard the ship is unraveled, father and daughter must rely on each other to survive as they hurtle toward the oblivion of a black hole.
Claire Denis's High Life is a genuinely singular work of science fiction—bleak, corporeal, and philosophically dense in ways that few genre films attempt. Robert Pattinson delivers a quietly devastating performance, and Juliette Binoche is mesmerizing as the deranged Dr. Dibs. Denis and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux craft a cold, claustrophobic aesthetic that makes the ship feel like a floating coffin. The film's approach to sexuality, mortality, and entropy is unmistakably Denis—no other filmmaker would make this film this way. The plot, however, is deliberately fragmented and elliptical to a fault; the non-linear structure obscures rather than enriches the narrative for many viewers, and the film's refusal of conventional storytelling can feel more withholding than rewarding. The ending—father and daughter drifting into the black hole—is hauntingly ambiguous but may feel anticlimactic given the buildup. Novelty is extremely high: this is one of the most distinctive science fiction films of the decade.