French filmmaker Claire Denis, one of the great living directors, has not lost her edge as she’s coasted into her 70s. Her latest film, “High Life,” which debuted last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival and is now making it to theaters, is as stimulating and challenging as anything she made in the ’90s. Although here, she’s taken us not to post-Colonial West Africa or modern day working-class France, but to the outer reaches of space to drift around an ominous black hole with Robert Pattinson and a baby, daring us to piece together how they ended up in such a precarious situation.
The only thing that’s immediately clear is that they are alone on this spaceship, and it is slowly and surely shutting down. Designed by Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, it sets a perfectly unnerving mood, and every day Pattinson has to convince a low-tech computer that he is healthy enough and the ship is stable enough to justify systems running for another 24 hours. It’s an existential chore to say the least.
Pattinson, as a character named Monte, doesn’t have much dialogue to work with. But there is a world of fear and anxiety in his eyes as he tries to tend to the needs of the creaky old ship and the adorable little infant in his care. He has a few flashbacks to a moment in his youth on a gray fall day with a young girl and a dog near a desolate pond in the woods, but it will take some time for the film to reveal what happened then and why it’s relevant.
Eventually you start to itch for the why and the how and Denis doesn’t disappoint with her patient reveals. First, you realize, there was other crew on board, but they’ve all died. Then things get even weirder — just take a peek at the rating description and you’ll start to see why, however it certainly doesn’t compare to the visceral horror of watching much of that transpire.
