High Life review: Robert Pattinson gives striking performance in Claire Denis’ black hole drama

The director’s English feature debut offers an arthouse twist on the typical Hollywood space adventure

Dir: Claire Denis. Starring: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, Mia Goth, Lars Eidinger, Agata Buzek. 18 cert, 113 mins

Veteran French director Claire Denis’ first English-language film is a fascinating mixture of highbrow and B-movie elements; there are strains of influence from directors Andrei Tarkovsky and Ed Wood, of JG Ballard’s post-apocalyptic novels and Star Trek. This is a sci-fi story made on a relatively modest budget but which continually startles us with its originality and offbeat lyricism.

Robert Pattinson gives one of his most striking performances as Monte, the death-row criminal in outer space, tricked into making a voyage described at one stage as a “class-one suicide ride”. The former Twilight star makes his shaven-headed, gaunt-faced character seem hyper naturally sensitive and feral at the same time.

As in many of Denis’ films, the rumbling music (from her regular collaborator Stuart A Staples of Tindersticks) sets the dreamy and sinister tone. A sense of extreme dislocation is felt throughout High Life. Denis is slow to share details about who her characters are and why they are hurtling through the galaxy, well out of human contact.

Early on, Monte is shown tending his baby daughter on a spaceship in which it appears all the other adults are either dead or in deep hibernation. He is a doting dad and the baby is very endearing, even if her crying does occasionally distract him from the task in hand, which is basic survival in a very hostile universe.

High Life pays the same attention to ecology and the natural world as Douglas Trumbull’s 1970s science fiction film Silent Running. The spaceship has its own, very luxuriant garden. There are flashbacks to scenes showing children in marshy woodlands. (This is when Monte committed the crime which landed him on the ill-fated space trip.) Venerable Indian actor Victor Banerjee is seen briefly as a scientist, talking about the “final age of man”. “We’ll be bone dust while they are still hurtling through space,” the professor says of the convicts.

The world is in crisis. That is why the crew of convicts and delinquents (“refuse that didn’t fit into the system”) have been dispatched on their mission to tap energy from a black hole and thereby provide humanity with “endless resources”.

The story has its own Dr Frankenstein-like figure, Dr Dibs (Juliette Binoche), a scientist on board with the criminals. She sedates and manipulates them as she tries to “harvest healthy foetuses” from them through artificial insemination.

Binoche plays the character as if she is a dancer in one of Pina Bausch’s surrealist ballets rather than someone in a naturalistic drama. It’s striking and very stylised acting. In one of the film’s sillier scenes, we see her in orgiastic rapture in the ship’s so-called f**k box, the special room (“a whole other rabbit hole”) set up for stealing the young convicts’ vital bodily fluids. She is a vampire-like figure, preying on them and sometimes going to absurd lengths to get what she wants.

Monte refuses to take part in her strange experiments. “Chastity was a way of making myself stronger,” he explains. But he can’t hide his attraction to the rebellious young Boyse (Mia Goth).

High Life leaps back and forward in time in disconcerting fashion. The dialogue is occasionally very stilted. The convicts talk as if they are juvenile delinquents on leave from Alan Clarke’s Scum. They’ll fight and swear like “filthy little crackheads” (as Binoche calls one of them). Boyse is continually haranguing Dr Dibbs. Their violent and very dysfunctional world is contrasted with the makeshift Eden that Monte later tries to create for his daughter. A voiceover from Pattinson is used to bridge the many gaps in the narrative.

This is a relatively grungy depiction of outer space. The Sputnik-like spaceship is short on luxuries. Its computers and operating system seem very low tech. There is no HAL-like computer to help with the navigation and troubleshooting. Dibbs is shown fiddling around with syringes and test tubes as if she is a provincial chemist. The characters are able to see random snippets of film from life back on Earth. They watch old westerns in which the native Americans are treated abominably. In one bizarre scene, someone stumbles on a rendition of “Flower of Scotland” from an old rugby match at Murrayfield. There are some inventive and very morbid visual flourishes in which astronauts have misadventures in molecular clouds or characters are shown floating through space.

High Life offers an arthouse twist on the typical Hollywood space adventure. Denis shows human nature at its worst but also celebrates the resilience and selflessness of its astronauts. It’s hard to work out what precisely the allegory is here and what bigger points the director is making about philosophy, religion or the environment. This, though, only adds to the sense of mystery that makes the film so tantalising.