Watched in the Arte Media Library

In "High Life" by Claire Denis, a baby's loud cries are the most obvious signs of human life at the beginning, drowning out the dreary rest of this oppressive science fiction setting. The French director starts at a point in the story which could actually herald the end of the film. As the last survivor of a space crew made up of felons and those condemned to death, Monte, played by Robert Pattinson, cares for a little baby who is apparently his daughter. The rest of the spaceship crew, who were sent on a mission to a black hole on Earth at some point to prevent their safe demise, are already dead in the initial scenes of "High Life". One last time Monte takes care of their bodies to wrap them in spacesuits and release them into the pitch black weightlessness of space, where they drift around to the film's title page, which finally appears.

Pitch-black darkness also describes the general narrative tone of Denis' film, which henceforth unfolds as a non-linearly staged intimate play in which the claustrophobic stagnation on board the spaceship collides with the deep abysses of the human crew. High Life is the study of a microcosm in which the suppressed desires and natural drives of the characters gradually take over. In addition to the feverish images and montages, the director is particularly interested in the constant contrasts that result from the ravine between the sterile setting and its contrast to the purely human.

Yorick Le Saux's camera floats with ominous serenity through the silent corridors of the spaceship, gazing around corners and into mysterious rooms that sometimes promise sexual stimulation, until the different bodies in this film repeatedly become the focus of the scenes. As a counter-reaction to the clinically pure scenes, Denis regularly studies her characters in this film about their bodily fluids. The director unloads all the pent-up emotions and suppressed desires bubbling up in the crew condemned to interpersonal chastity with a curious glance at flowing blood, easily visible sweat on the skin, breast milk squeezed from breasts or sperm used for experimental research by the only female doctor on board. It is not for nothing that Dr. Dibs, played by Juliette Binoche, is once referred to in the film as a sperm shaman. She is the one who is determined to provide for the next generation by means of artificial insemination, while the rest of the crew is held captive in senseless emptiness.

Only a few flashbacks, which were specially filmed in Poland and which, due to their strong coarseness and poetic fragility, could have come directly from a work by the great Andrei Tarkovsky, still allow the viewer to have contact with the earth as loose fragments of memory. Otherwise, High Life is an apocalyptically fragmented journey between space and time to the edge of the universe, which at the same time means an introverted journey into the decay of humanity. In the elliptically closed narrative, Denis leaves little hope for the survival of civilisation as soon as the hypnotic sequences in the second half of the film are increasingly permeated by murderous violence. But even amidst the almost overshadowing pessimism that pushes this latently disturbing science fiction poem towards its inevitable demise, the director finally makes a face that, in the face of approaching irrational finality, blurs with the stars of the cosmos.