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Year: 2019
Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes
The sole survivor of a scientific experiment on outer space breeding and the study of black holes is left to raise the little girl that experiment produced on his own.
A24 is a studio known for its introspective character studies about life, love, regret, family, and growing up. Sometimes, however, their movies are simply about a fuck-box in space. "High Life" (2019) is helmed by French director Claire Denis, who is known for such films as "Beau travail" (1999), "35 Shots of Rum" (2008), and "Let the Sunshine In" (2017). She also helped write the film along with Geoff Cox and her frequent collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau. This film is about a man named Monte (Robert Pattinson), who is alone on a spaceship traveling near the speed of the light with the infant he is raising. The story dives into his past, including how he and his other crew members (Mia Goth, André Benjamin, Claire Tran, Lars Eidinger, Agata Buzek, Gloria Obianyo, Ewan Mitchell, and Juliette Binoche) got there and why. They made an exchange on earth to be subjected to an experiment that would see if fertility in space would be possible. Turns out, it did. Now, Monte and Willow (Scarlette Lindsey) are headed towards their ultimate destination: through the darkness of space towards a black hole.
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| "They lied to us, and you knew it." (Image Source) |
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| "She's mine. I'm hers." (Image Source) |
"High Life" (2019) received critical acclaim during its run on the festival circuit, and it also had a lot of positive response on Film Twitter™. We have liked much of what Robert Pattinson has done post-"Twilight" (2008) as he has begun to explore his range as an actor. His performance in "Good Time" (2017) was one of our favorites the year it was released. Needless to say, we were excited about this film, so you can imagine our disappointment when we sat down to finally watch what turned out to be a pretty pretentious, self-indulgent slog. We can *kind of* appreciate its artistic merit, but more often than not, we were annoyed and disappointed with what we saw. People are jettisoned into space, there's a weird sex box, there's an overabundance of bodily fluids, and there are lots and lots of rapes, almost all of which felt pointless due to it being left on such an ambiguous note. You could do some mental gymnastics and assign whatever meaning you want to the story, and quite frankly, any argument would be valid, including that it's all entirely meaningless. There is also a random character in the middle of the movie who only exists to deliver one line of exposition, and then they are never seen again. Any other person could have given us the information he provided. It's just bizarre. We struggled to remember a single character's name without looking them up. We didn't feel any emotions beyond discomfort and, on occasion, disgust, and if that was the point of the thing, well, we don't wish to do it again.
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| "They will never come back." (Image Source) |
"High Life" (2019) is sure to be adored and debated by indie cinema fans for years to come. Maybe it just wasn't the movie for us. They can't all be. We'll stick with the other fantastic movies in R.Patz's increasingly impressive filmography.
BigJ's Rating: 4/10
IMDB's Rating: 6.1/10
RT Rating: 82%
Do we recommend this movie: No.
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