High Life (2018). Directed by Claire Denis. Written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, with Geoff Cox. Starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, and Mia Goth.
On April 10, 2019, the researchers behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) announced that they had captured the first-ever images of a black hole. The EHT is not a singular telescope but a radio telescope array, which means it combines data from radio telescopes around the world using a technique called Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), which allows astronomers to make observations that would otherwise only be possible by building an impossibly large telescope. We can’t build a telescope with the diameter of Earth, but we can combine data from telescopes on opposite sides of the Earth to form high-resolution images of very distant astronomical objects.
The image the EHT shared with the world in 2019 is of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87), a galaxy about 55 million light-years away. Scientists were delighted, of course, because the image provided support for the models of black holes derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
Far outside the world of research science and academia, news of the image reached French filmmaker Claire Denis in a flurry of texts and a phone call from actor Robert Pattinson, all eager to point out that the real black hole looked very much like the black hole in High Life, which had been released the year before. Denis in turn called physicist Aurélien Barrau, who had consulted on the scientific aspects of the film, to talk about the news.
That black hole, the one in the movie, is the work of artist Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson is primarily a large-scale and installation artist known for works like “The weather project” (2003) at the Tate Modern and for introducing environmentally-safe dyes into rivers in major cities without warning. In 2014, Eliasson and Denis met and began discussing a mutual fascination with using art to represent black holes and other mysterious scientific phenomena. Denis was already working on High Life and was interested in Eliasson’s way of playing with light and shadow, and together they made the short film Contact as a test-run for their shared fascination. Contact is just over three minutes long and pretty much does look like a test of many of the stylistic choices that later appear in High Life: the arcs of orange light, the half-lit faces viewed in shadowy profile; everything is intense and nothing is explained.
Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote that High Life is “tailor-made for viewers who like science fiction in a cryptic 1970s art-house mode.” That’s such a perfect introduction to the film that I’m not going to try to improve on it. Yes, in fact, that’s exactly what it is. Whether that type of movie is for you or not is a matter of personal preference. I happen to love my science fiction in cryptic 1970s art-house mode, so I am the target audience for this movie.
There are very few female directors in the history of film who sit comfortably in the boys’ club of so-called auteur directors, but Claire Denis is one of them. After finishing film school in the early ’70s, she got her start working as an assistant or unit director on several films, but her big break came when she worked as assistant director to Wim Wenders on his films Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987) and to Jim Jarmusch on Down by Law (1986). Wenders told her she ought to go direct her own films—which she did. Denis’ first film, Chocolat (1988), which calls upon her own childhood in French-colonized West Africa, was well received, and she’s been making movies ever since.
High Life is both her first English-language film and her first science fiction film. But the idea had been with her for a decade or longer. Like so many of us have done at some in our lives, Denis was reading the work of Stephen Hawking and thinking about how the physics of traveling through space and time would impact human life. The initial kernel of the story was very simple, as she explained in a 2019 interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “I had this idea in mind of a man alone in space in a ship far away from the solar system so there is no hope to return and the crew is dead.” She spent about a decade researching, developing, and writing the story with her frequent screenwriting partner Jean-Pol Fargeau. A producer suggested the film be in English rather than French, so Denis and Fargeau brought on Geoff Cox to translate.
There were other writers involved along the way, some of whom might have resulted in the film having a very different ending if they’d had their way. Novelists and married couple Nick Laird and Zadie Smith worked on the screenplay for a time; the announcement of this collaboration was big news among literary types, thanks to Smith’s stature in the community. But Smith and Laird eventually left the project due to creative differences—apparently genuine creative differences, not the euphemistic “creative differences” that imply any other sort of problem. According to Denis, they couldn’t agree on how the story should go, and particularly on how it should end. Smith wanted the ship and characters to return to Earth at the end, whereas Denis never even considered that to be a possibility. Smith, for her part, hasn’t said much about the time she spent working on the screenplay, but what little she has said suggests she envisioned a significantly less bleak story than the one Denis had in mind.
I don’t know what a sci fi movie written by Zadie Smith would look like. (I’ll happily watch if she ever pens one!) But one has to admit that just about anything would be less bleak than High Life.
The nonlinear story begins with Monte (Robert Pattinson) living on a spaceship with nobody but a baby girl, Willow (portrayed by Scarlett Lindsey as a baby, Jessie Ross when she’s older), for company. Monte spends his time repairing the ship, tending the garden, and taking care of the baby. Those garden scenes in the opening sequence remind me a lot of both the slow, earthbound opening of Solaris (1972) and the habitats of Silent Running (1972), and I think such visual references are deliberate. There’s a stark contrast between the small pocket of life represented by a man, his daughter, and what keeps them alive, and the cold lifelessness of everything around them.
The science in the film is straightforward, presented without embellishment. The ship looks like a box from the outside, and the inside is largely utilitarian, like the prison-laboratory it is—except for the garden, which is overwhelmingly lush. There are bunks, locker rooms, corridors. The spacesuits are clunky, the uniforms bland. Denis took herself and some of the cast and crew to the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne to learn about the dull, unglamorous details of living in space, so that all of that could be handled without fanfare.
Before the film’s title even appears on screen, we learn that the ship (which has no name, only the number 7) receives only random, automated transmissions from Earth, many in the form of old movies or tv shows. We also learn that the ship is designed to turn off life support unless somebody on board provides proof of life every day, so every day Monte sits down to make a report and convince the ship that the “crew” is still alive and the “mission” is still ongoing.
That is, at best, a generous interpretation of events. The rest of the crew is dead; we watch Monte bring their bodies out of freezer storage and dump them into space. The title card image of the corpses floating—or falling—in darkness is hauntingly beautiful and one of the most striking images I’ve seen in a sci fi film.
From there, we flash back in time to learn how man and child came to be alone in space: Monte was one of several condemned prisoners who volunteered for a space mission to avoid execution. The official stated purpose of the mission is to travel to a black hole and test the Penrose process, a theoretical mechanism by which it would be possible to extract energy from a black hole, first proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971. The second, more genuine purpose is to use a bunch of condemned prisoners to study how humans live and die in space.
It is understood to be a one-way trip for criminals who have no other options—or, in the case of Tcherny (André Benjamin, aka André 3000), seeking some vague sense of pride about going where no one has gone before. There are no guards aboard the unnamed #7 ship, no scientists or crew; there are only prisoners. Even the ship’s captain (played by Lars Eidinger) and pilot (Agata Buzek) are prisoners, living right alongside the others and subject to the same indignities, most of which come courtesy of Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who is conducting fertility experiments on the others in an attempt to achieve human procreation in the radiation of space.
This situation unsurprisingly creates a toxic stew of repression (the only sex is solitary and happens in an isolating “fuckbox”), violence, sexual assault, and nonconsensual medical experimentation. Juliette Binoche is here doing what Juliette Binoche does best, being intense and alluring and weirdly charming, even as she’s doing horrific things in the name of her twisted idea of science, or telling the story about how back on Earth she murdered her children and husband.
One by one the prisoners die: by Dibs’ experiments, by euthanasia, by suicide, by violence, and by one gruesome instance of spaghettification. Only Monte and the infant Willow are left.
We eventually skip forward in time, beyond where the film begins, and we learn that even years later, Monte is keeping himself and Willow alive. She’s reaching puberty now, and they are still traveling through space, because there is nowhere else for them to go. They still convince the ship to keep them alive every day, although the ship is definitely showing some wear and tear. They still receive transmissions from Earth, but they have been traveling far enough and fast enough that they know much more time has passed on Earth.
While watching this movie, I couldn’t quite figure out how I felt about it. It’s extremely well-made and visually stunning, and the acting is fantastic even if the dialogue is sometimes rather flat. It’s brutal and upsetting, but there are times when the brutality feels a bit cold and removed, particularly in contrast to the sweet, sad moments with Monte and his daughter. There is a lot of really intriguing and powerful stuff in here about human behavior in confined environments, about incarceration and medical experimentation on prisoners, about the people a society views as disposable, about the choices people have to make every day to keep living.
Because of all that, I felt as I was watching that I was mostly enjoying it because I found it fascinating, not because it was really getting its hooks into me.
Then they find the dog ship, and I decide that I love this movie.
Not because of the dogs—I mean, not not because of the dogs. I’m not hating on the dogs! Don’t come at me for being a dog hater! It’s just that it’s not really about the dogs.
Let me explain.
Monte and Willow come across another ship after years of isolation. The ship is nearly identical to theirs: a big, unglamorous box with no name except for a number. When I watched, I made a note that the number was 6, but I’ve found reviews that interpret it as 6, and some that interpret it as 9, and all of them seem to draw some importance from whether that ship was launched before or after 7. I’m not sure that actually matters; I took it to mean there were at least 7 ships tossed into space as part of these experiments, and probably many more.
Monte heads over to the ship to see if there is anybody left on it, but instead of human prisoners or crew he finds a pack of feral dogs. Living dogs, dead dogs, puppies. Just a lot of dogs.
It’s unexpected and creepy and so freaking weird. The film never explains it. Yes, it’s understood that this ship was also part of the experiment, but how the dogs survive and reproduce in space, who is flying the dog ship and keeping it going, what happened to the humans, none of that is ever explained.
I love that. I don’t want something so weird to be explained. A lot of other sci fi writers and filmmakers would try to explain it, because of the inevitable questions it raises, but I’m so happy Denis resisted the impulse. I love that it’s inexplicable and sad and unsettling and it does nothing to materially change Monte and Willow’s lives, but it changes something in how they think about their situation.
I’m not entirely sure why that one scene makes the whole movie click for me, but it does, and I’m glad for it.
The ending is also ambiguous—or at least, I thought it was ambiguous, but just like the question 6 or 9, reviews and write-ups seem to disagree on that as well. I feel like if critics can’t even agree on whether or not an ending is ambiguous, that makes it ambiguous, but what do I know?
The way I understood the ending is that Monte and Willow have spent the past dozen years or so looking for different black holes, until they find one they can try to travel through. Willow makes a comment at one point that the black hole they are approaching is “less dense” and therefore more suitable.
And they take a smaller ship into a black hole at the end. That’s how the film ends, in a scene of light and darkness very reminiscent of Denis’ short film Contact. We don’t know what happens to them. Whether they live or die, whether they pass to another universe or not, they’re out of our reach. That’s the ending I saw.
Then I went online a read write-ups from professional film critics who very confidently state that the black hole at the end is the same one as before, they’ve just been hanging out nearby for Willow’s entire life, and the dog ship shows up to make them realize survival is pointless, and they fly into the black hole knowing they will die a horrible spaghettifying death.
People have, of course, asked Denis about the ending. At one film event she said, “Let’s say you could enter a black hole. Some people believe you might reach another universe, or something. If you reach this limit called the singularity, where time and space become zero. I thought that was the perfect image for infinity.”
Perhaps some people who write about this film crave clarity that it does not provide, so they cling to an interpretation that sounds suitably depressing, even though the film actually ends on a solemn but hopeful note. A lot of moviegoers, even those who love sci fi with that ’70s arthouse vibe, want certainty in stories uninterested in providing it. It’s been nearly 60 years and that’s still a complaint lodged against 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the case of High Life, it’s another kind of uncertainty, one that opens the question of whether humans are different from animals, or whether staying alive is different from choosing to live.
I love that about it. I like that Denis has been very clear that she also doesn’t know what that means. She doesn’t know what happens to the characters. She doesn’t know their fate. It’s not that I need the director to tell me what a movie means, but rather that I appreciate when a director almost laughs at the idea that there is not a secret puzzle to figure out to make all the meaning fall into place. The story is meant to be malleable, ambiguous, unknowable, because sometimes that makes more sense than solid answers.
What do you think about High Life? There is a lot to unpack in this delightfully weird movie, and I would love to hear your thoughts about the dogs, the deaths, and the ending.
Next week: Instead of heading out into deep space, we’re going to launch ourselves right into the heart of our solar system with Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, and Hulu.
