High Life puzzles public expectations for a space thriller

The new, grotesque, fascinating and unique sci-fi film by Claire Denis High life opens on a series of particular images. A lush garden covers the floor and walls of a spaceship greenhouse. A toddler is crying in an improvised park. An astronaut tries to console her from the outside of the ship and accidentally loses one of her tools that falls into the void below. down, as it appears that gravity still affirms his will away from the solar system. All of these defy what most audiences will assume about cinematographic and real space travel, where humans adapt to artificial conditions and submit to the rigors of astrophysics. For Denis, baffling the public from the start is an effective and disconcerting statement of intent.

French director who made her debut in English, Denis has for decades been one of the great sensualists of cinema, renowned for her elliptical love treatments, such as Friday night and 35 rum shots, or colonialism, as White material or Chocolate, or something in between, like Good work, his film about the erotic tension between French legionnaires in Djibouti. His last blow to genre cinema, 2001 Trouble Every Day, has turned a carnivorous vampirism story into a metaphor for devouring erotic desire. It is never in his interest to respect the conventions. If breaking the mold means completely reversing the laws of space and time, she is certainly willing to drive the world's Neil Tyson Neil in some catatonies.

With High life, Denis complies with science fiction, colonizing a spaceship with roughnecks and agents of chaos that could not be further from the sterile and calculating cervids that usually launch into orbit. (To this end, the film would make a fascinating double film with the action film directed by Luc Besson Locking, aka Prison of the spacealthough his philosophical approach of the genre places the film firmly in the abstract field of classics like that of Andrei Tarkovsky Solaris or 2001: The Space Odyssey, Denis completely rejects the sterility of these films. His ship is emotionally and conflictingly overflowing with organic matter – blood, sweat, sperm and spittle.

The enigmatic center of the storm is Monte (Robert Pattinson), who opens High life as a survivor of a space mission that went wrong. The other survivor is the child, who was born on the ship under circumstances that Denis takes his time to explain. In one of the most haunting sequences of the film, Monte gathers the bodies of his fellow travelers and throws them into the void. Denis stages their descent into the void, as if it were snowflakes in a soft and deep snowfall.

As usual for Denis' work, High life the flights move skillfully in time, but it ends up filling the missing pieces. Monte and most of the crew are death row inmates who have been sent into space to try to find an alternative source of energy for the Earth. He seems determined to keep his head down and to make his time, like his colleague gardener Tcherny (André Benjamin). But the other members of the team, played by Mia Goth, Claire Tran and Ewan Mitchell, cause many more problems. And none of them seems to be deeply involved in the ship's mission: to study the Penrose process – a real-world theory developed by Stephen Hawking physicist and collaborator, Roger Penrose – which says that one Abundance of energy could be extracted from a black hole, potentially saving the planet.

Of course, no one expects the crew to come back alive from this mission, which dramatically affects the ship's atmosphere. For people already subject to violence and rebellion, the combination of proximity and their status as suicide guinea pigs naturally leads to discord. Much of the tension rises around the devilish Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who collected sperm samples from the men aboard and who attempted to inseminate the women, without much success. When Monte refuses to participate and makes a vow of celibacy, Dibs is obsessed with obsession, and she takes dramatic steps to get what she needs.

Dibs' interest in designing a baby on a ship destined for oblivion is one of the many confusing mysteries of High lifethat Denis is content to leave in suspense. Although the film is its biggest American film, with a major star, A24 distributor support, and no language barrier, it is also one of the least accessible, as it remains so firmly opposed to reason. But her previous work is a clue that she sees the disorder of human desire as paramount, even in an environment that works to suppress it.

Photo: A24

Life finds its way on this ship, despite a crew of prisoners attached to a suicide mission, and still locked in the seemingly barren restrictions of space. There is still room for love and compassion, rape and murder, and violent masturbatory sessions with a "Fuckbox" – a small piece that looks like Woody Allen's Orgasmatron. Sleeper, if it had been conceived by George Clooney's character in Burn after reading.

And yet, despite all the efforts that Denis deploys to demystify space, he transforms it deeply. Although it is widely proven that the black hole will crush Monte and the child, Denis is not in a position to say it with certainty and remains amazed by the heavenly beauty they encounter on the way. Although Tindersticks' superb sound design and music, Denis's longtime singer and collaborator, Stuart A. Staples, both vibrate with fear and fear, High life is not so overwhelmed by an oppressive emotion that all hope is equally overshadowed. At a time when the Earth itself seems to be sinking into misfortune, the presence of a real wonder and a new life in the film is stamped with optimism. Faced with emptiness, in the confines of far-off space, humanity persists.

High life opens in limited edition in New York and Los Angeles on April 5 and extends to a larger version on April 12. Check the official ticketing site for more information on local screenings.