High Life

Director: Claire Denis

2018 / 113min / DCP

Science fiction as done by Claire Denis is science fiction unlike anything you’ve ever seen, a bold experiment to the outer limits of genre, where no woman has gone before. Robert Pattinson, in a performance of quiet intensity and gravitas, is first encountered living alone with an infant on a spaceship adrift in the dark of space. Flashing back from this somber, beguiling opening, Denis introduces us to the former crew of this prison ship, on which Pattinson’s stubbornly celibate Monte is among the condemned guinea pigs at the disposal of Binoche’s diabolical filicide “Dr. Dibs”—inspired, per Denis, by Medea of Greek tragedy—who busies herself with attempting to prove that a child can be conceived and born in outer space between sessions in the ship’s “fuck box.” Troublingly erotic, intensely physical and headily philosophical, Denis’s first fully English-language film is a work of mastery and melancholy, a film following a voyage into the unknown that is itself exactly that.

Part of Juliette Binoche: Emotion in Motion