High Life: Denis's Sperm-and-Black-Holes Prison Ship

The ship in High Life is a box. Claire Denis and her designers built a rectangular block with no fins, no curves, no aerodynamic flourish of any kind, because there is no air in space and an object travelling through vacuum has no reason to be shaped like anything. It looks like a shipping container with lights on. Everyone who saw it in 2018 read the choice as austerity or as a budget constraint. It is neither. A shipping container is what you put cargo in when nobody is going to look at it, and the seven people inside this one were sentenced to death.

That is the film’s entire proposition, stated in its production design before a word is spoken. A group of condemned prisoners were offered a choice between execution and a mission, they chose the mission, and the mission is a lie in the sense that all their choices are lies — they are being flown at a black hole to attempt to extract rotational energy from it, on the theory that if they die doing something scientifically interesting, the death is no longer an execution.

Denis opens the film at the end of that story. Monte (Robert Pattinson) is alone on the ship with an infant, doing maintenance in a spacesuit, talking to the baby over a monitor while she screams in an empty room. He is fixing things nobody will ever use. He is growing vegetables he will never sell. The film’s first genuinely disturbing image involves no blood at all. Monte pushes a trolley of corpses out of an airlock, one after another, in their spacesuits, with the deliberate weariness of a man who does the bins.

Denis in English

High Life is Claire Denis’s first English-language feature, made after four decades of French cinema that includes Beau Travail, 35 Shots of Rum and Trouble Every Day. She wrote it with Jean-Pol Fargeau, her collaborator since the 1980s, and Geoff Cox; Zadie Smith and Nick Laird worked on the English dialogue at one stage of the long development, which is a fact worth knowing mainly because you can hear the seams where a Denis film has been asked to speak a language whose rhythms she does not think in.

That awkwardness is not entirely a flaw. Denis has never been a dialogue director. Her films are constructed out of skin, light, gesture, the back of a neck, an unexplained cut — a grammar that survives translation perfectly, because it was never verbal. When High Life talks, it can clank. When it looks, it is unanswerable.

She also had a physicist. Aurélien Barrau consulted on the science, and the film’s black hole is doing real theoretical work — the plan the crew are executing is a version of a genuinely proposed mechanism for drawing energy from a rotating singularity. Denis is not interested in explaining it and the film barely tries, but the rigour underneath matters. The mission is coherent. That is what makes it obscene. Somebody sat in a room, on Earth, and worked out that the cheapest way to run this experiment was with people who were legally already dead.

The Dibs problem

Juliette Binoche plays Dr Dibs, the ship’s doctor, who is also a prisoner, and who has been given a second protocol nobody voted on: reproduction. Dibs collects semen from the male prisoners and inseminates the women. She is running a fertility programme in a metal box at relativistic speed on a crew of murderers, and she believes in it with the total, unembarrassed conviction of someone who has found the one thing that makes her continued existence a project rather than a sentence.

Binoche’s performance is the most extreme thing she has ever done and one of the bravest of her career, and the reason it works is that she never plays Dibs as mad. She plays her as a professional. The bedside manner is real. The care is real. The violation is administered with the same hands. Denis has always been the great filmmaker of appetite — Trouble Every Day is a vampire film about the failure of desire to stay inside a body — and Dibs is her most complete statement on the subject: a woman whose hunger has been given a laboratory and a budget line.

Then there is the room. The ship has a masturbation chamber, a padded cell of a thing with a saddle in the middle, and the crew call it what the crew would call it. The scene of Dibs using it is the film’s most notorious sequence and the one that emptied cinemas. It is also, on rewatch, the most formally precise thing in the picture: Denis shoots it in near-darkness, in fragments, with Stuart Staples’s score doing something enormous underneath, and refuses the two available registers — titillation and disgust. What she films instead is somebody praying. The chamber is the only place on the ship where a person is permitted an interior life, which is why the institution built it, and why it is the loneliest room in modern science fiction.

Craft: the garden, and what green means in a black box

The one soft thing on the ship is the garden. A module of soil and leaves and water, tended by Tcherny (André Benjamin, giving the film’s warmest and most grounded performance), producing food the crew do not strictly need because their nutrition is handled. It is there for morale, which is to say it is there so the prisoners have something to be gentle with.

Yorick Le Saux photographs the garden in a completely different register from the rest of the ship — dense greens, water light, shallow focus, a texture close to Denis’s tropical films. Everywhere else, the palette is grey, beige, institutional, lit from above with the flat unkindness of a corridor. The cut between those two worlds does the film’s emotional accounting without a line of dialogue. Every time somebody walks from the beige into the green, you understand exactly what has been taken from them.

The garden also sets up the film’s cruellest structural irony. These people are cultivating life in a room while a woman down the corridor cultivates it in their bodies without asking. One of those programmes is voluntary. Denis lets you notice.

The honest case against

High Life is a film with a first hour that plays as a series of provocations and a last half hour that plays as a film. The flashback structure buries its own stakes: because Denis shows us Monte alone at the start, every scene of the crew alive is a countdown to a foregone conclusion, and the middle sags under the weight of an ending we have already been given. Some of the violence is staged with a detachment that reads as evasion rather than restraint. Mia Goth’s Boyse is a genuinely alive presence handed a function. Lars Eidinger’s Chandra is barely a character.

And the English does hurt. Lines that would land as flat statements in French — Denis’s actors have always spoken in a register just short of declarative — arrive in English sounding portentous, and Pattinson, who is otherwise extraordinary here, occasionally has to eat a sentence no human has said aloud.

But Pattinson is the reason to see it. This is the performance where he stopped being a former teen star with good taste and became one of the most interesting screen actors alive. Monte is celibate by choice, in a ship organised entirely around extraction, and Pattinson plays that abstinence as the last available act of ownership. He gives almost nothing. He is completely readable. It is a magic trick.

The real ancestor

Everyone reaches for Solaris and 2001, and Denis has the Tarkovsky patience and none of the Kubrick geometry. The truer ancestor sits outside the genre entirely: Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956). Bresson’s film is a prison drama in which the entire drama is procedure — hands, spoons, wood, rope, the exact mechanics of a door — and in which the escape, when it comes, reads as grace rather than victory. High Life is that film with the walls moved to the edge of the universe. Monte’s maintenance rounds are Fontaine scraping at his door. The spacesuit is the cell.

The other family member is Aniara, which arrived within months and asks the same question from the opposite end. Kågerman and Lilja’s passengers fill the void with commerce and cults; Denis’s prisoners fill it with the body. Watch them together and European science fiction’s whole thesis lands: the ship is a room, the room is a sentence, and the stars are set dressing.

It streams and rents. Go in cold, and go in prepared to dislike it for an hour.

Spoilers below

Everything past this point is the film.

The paternity is the knot. Dibs sedates Monte and takes his semen while he is unconscious — the one man on the ship who has refused the programme, violated in his sleep by the woman running it — and uses it to impregnate Boyse, who does not consent either. Willow is the product of a double rape administered by a doctor with a clipboard. Denis stages none of it as horror. It is a procedure, filmed as a procedure, and that is why it is the most upsetting thing in the film.

Boyse’s death is a technical accident with a moral cause — she takes a shuttle towards the singularity because it is the only steering wheel on the ship anyone has been allowed to touch, and Denis films the crossing of the event horizon as spaghettification rendered in a few seconds of hallucinated stretch. It is the cheapest visual effect in the film and the only one it needs.

Dibs’s own end is the film’s grimmest joke. Having spent the entire mission as the one person with a purpose, she walks into the black hole with her hair loose, having achieved exactly what she came for and having nowhere to put it. Binoche plays her exit as satisfaction. The garden dies. Tcherny goes into the soil, in the one image in the film that could be called tender.

And then Willow grows up, played by Jessie Ross, and the film’s last movement is the taboo Denis has been circling from frame one: a father and a daughter, alone, the last two humans, in a box. She writes it with total control and refuses the obvious. What Monte and Willow do is find the second ship, find the dogs, understand what the mission was always for, and then decide. The final approach — the two of them in the shuttle, the yellow light filling the frame, the cut to black — is the only ending available. Bresson would have called it grace. Denis lets it be a shrug and a hand held, and the film that spent two hours proving no one aboard ever had a choice ends with two people making one.