High Life

Twenty-for-Seven: #2 (day 1)

2018, d. Claire Denis - AmazonPrime

The film opens on Monte (Robert Pattinson) making repairs on the exterior of a spacecraft while he talks with the baby inside, contained in a makeshift pen, with monitors displaying a variety of old earth programming.  They are alone, but we don't know why.  As the first act progresses, we get flashes of, presumably, Monte's youth on Earth...walking in the woods, a dog, a friend, the friend standing over the dog's body in a stream, the friend dead herself.  The flashes are so brief as to tease a puzzle. Two concurrent puzzles. 

We catch Monte's life and routine on the space ship, caring for an infant, working through his own depression, inputting reports into an automated system every 24 hours to sustain the life support systems. and disposing of bodies out of the air vent (but with delicate care).

Act two jumps back in time, revealing that this started out as ship full of convicts, sent out into deep space in an experiment to reach a black hole and "capture its rotation" (a "class 1 suicide ride" they describe it as).  The group of prisoners includes a doctor obsessed with reproduction, and is performing insemination experiments on the prisoners, but the radiation is killing the babies.  The crew is an uneasy mix, and a lot of weird shit happens on this ship, leading to murders and suicides.

The third act moves forward about 15 years in the future, to find Monte and his daughter Willow working the rounds on the ship.  They have been long out of communication from earth and isolated with only each other's company.  They encounter another experimental transport, only to discover things went even more wrong there, before reaching the black hole and venturing into it together.

High Life is a fascinating and meditative science fiction tale.  I'm not certain the moral or message after this initial viewing.  I had assumed initially it was an exploration of depression, but the second act toils so much in the dire circumstances of the crew, reveling in its ugly primalness and desperation, that it seems the point.  The third act finds its own level of solace, comfort and resignation, rather than the earlier depression and despair.  It leaves an impression regardless.

There's a retro cheapness to the production, giving it a 70's aesthetic with some more modern touches, and yet there's almost too many modern touches that will, in the future, date this film as part of its time.  It all seems intentional, as if Denis was looking at 70's sci-fi films and wanting to replicate their outdated timelessness.  The cheapness, perhaps of the set or ship (the ship exterior looks like a wood-paneled cargo container, strangely boxy) or costume design is masqued by effective direction and editing, the performances and mood leading the film.

This fits in the Silent Running/Solaris mold of pensive spacefaring that we don't get enough of, or at least rarely do modern versions of this type of story manage to do it so effectively.