Claire Denis’s latest film, High Life, opens with an exchange of voices: the cry of a baby, Willow, and the murmuring “dada” of her father Monte (Robert Pattinson), attempting to comfort his daughter over a video monitor. This exchange directs attention toward the nature of the voice: that we are relational beings is signalled in that very “first cry of the infant – an invoking that unknowingly entrusts itself to a voice that responds.”i The opening sequence makes it clear the two of them are alone, that there is no other voice. By asking the viewer to attend to these voices, the film sets up its wider question: what happens to human relationships when there is no future imaginable? High Life begins and ends as a quiet study of a father and his daughter aboard an abandoned spaceship. Through an extended flashback, we learn that Monte and his daughter are the sole survivors of a space programme which exploits incarcerated prisoners to build up Earth’s energy resources. Willow’s conception is the result of the forced insemination of Boyse (Mia Goth). As Willow cries, the camera tracks across a wet and verdant garden. This image of thriving life, albeit vegetal, is undercut by the images that follow, which hint at a now-departed human presence. A partially-buried workman’s boot, a gently-blowing curtain, an empty corridor, a ladder leading into black. The film cuts to Monte, fixing an exterior panel as he speaks into the microphone of his spacesuit helmet. A dropped work tool disappears into the black gulf of space, and the sound does too. The weight of this silence is arresting. For a few brief seconds, there is no noise.
The narrative’s non-linear unfolding is shot through with a strangeness that rewards repeat viewing. Although High Life is Denis’s first solely English-language film, and her most explicit engagement with the science fiction genre, its elliptical narrative style provokes what Martine Beugnet calls “a fertile cinematic experience of de-familiarisation” which necessitates other ways of seeing and listening.ii This de-familiarisation is accentuated by Denis’s distinctive focus on materiality, from bodies on-screen to the textures of sound and image, and minimal psychological explanation that invites the viewer to derive their own sense. Denis’s films alter, yet never entirely eschew, conventional modes of cinematic representation, and High Life makes ample use of Monte’s voice-over narration, flashback sequences, and an explanatory interview between a journalist and a Professor (listed as ‘Indian Professor’ in the credits) on a train journey, to orient the viewer within the narrative. Rather than emphasising its genre (science fiction) or setting (space), Denis has instead called High Life her “prison film”. Monte, the viewer learns, is a victim of an experimental programme by Western governments to send groups of prisoners into space, with the ostensible aim of capturing a black hole’s rotational power to build up Earth’s energy resources. This allusion to a scarcity of energy is mirrored in the narrative through a parallel scarcity of resources on ship, and points to a context of climate emergency. In keeping the viewer in the dark about the state of the Earth the prisoners have left behind, emphasising its uncertain future, the film evokes the threat this scarcity poses to the survival of the planet and the humans that populate it. Importantly, from the Professor’s explicit reference to “Occidental” governments, to the opening image of baby Monte watching a clip on the video screen from In the Land of the Headhunters, a 1914 white settler ‘ethnographic’ film of the Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia,iii High Life sets this resource extraction narrative in colonialist terms – familiar territory for the science fiction genre but also for Denis, whose films are marked by her long-standing attention to France’s colonial legacy.iv
The timeline of High Life is somewhat opaque, as if the viewer is caught in the diverging temporalities of the prisoners in space and those they’ve left back on Earth. When the viewer first encounters the other prisoners, they are already dead, preserved in a cryogenic chamber. This takes power, and so Monte shuts down the chamber. A wordless, intricately-choreographed sequence shows him dressing the prisoners in their spacesuits. As he carries each body across the floor and jettisons them off the spaceship, only the sounds of him shifting under their weight and his laboured breathing are audible. The isolation of these bodily sounds underscores Monte’s (and Willow’s) abandonment. He stands in the illuminated doorway of the spaceship, and the film cuts to a striking image of the prisoners’ bodies as they fall, moving slowly away through star-filled black. What then follows is an extended flashback set four years into their mission, tracing the chain of events that has led to Willow’s conception, and father and daughter’s radical mutual dependence. This opens with Boyse, soon to become Willow’s biological mother, as she carves into the wall of the spaceship with broken glass. Monte attempts to restrain her and she attacks him with the glass. Afterwards, Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche with hip-grazing hair) dresses Monte’s wound; while Boyse looks on, criticising Dr. Dibs’s treatment of a pregnant prisoner, Elektra (Gloria Obianyo). The next scene shows Dr. Dibs collecting sperm from the other male prisoners: Captain Chandra (Lars Eidinger), Tcherny (André Benjamin), and Ettore (Ewan Mitchell). In the futureless world of High Life, relationality – the focus on human relationships, especially those of kinship – has been transformed by reproductive experiments beyond the prisoners’ control. The film extends its focus on extractive economies and incarceration to control over bodies, especially those of women and particularly those of black women, via sex and reproduction. Elektra is the first prisoner to die due to pregnancy complications, to which Tcherny remarks “even up here, black ones are the first to go.”
This attention is not sustained. The film is more interested in the reproductive experiments of Dr. Dibs, the so-called “shaman of sperm” who attempts to create new life capable of enduring the dangerously high radiation levels on the spaceship, which prove fatal for Captain Chandra and at least one newborn baby. She forces the male prisoners to give up their sperm, and artificially inseminates the female prisoners against their will and, at one point, against their knowledge. The prisoners make use of a self-cleaning “fuck-box” to fulfil their own sexual needs (in which Binoche gives a memorable durational performance). Yet violence erupts. The film juxtaposes two scenes of rape with two different perpetrators: one male and catastrophically fatal; the other female and somnolent and medicalised, filmed with a disturbing sensuousness. The latter has equally blood-filled and fatal consequences nine months later when Willow is born, the product of Dr. Dibs’ forcible collection and insemination of Monte’s sperm into Boyse’s body. Whether the trauma is fatally visceral or extended, the stress is emphatically on violence against women, rather than against Monte. Denis’s gendered and radically different portrayals of rape are discomfiting: a generous reading would suggest that this difference is perhaps less about Dr. Dibs as female perpetrator, and more about her association with, and ‘reproduction’ of, state power on the spaceship. However, I remain struck by, or rather stuck on, the cut from Boyse’s inseminated stomach to the image of a swirling cosmos. Regardless of whether it is Dr. Dibs’s subjective perspective, what does it mean that High Life invokes, even visually delights in, the violated womb as site of worlding?
In voice-over, Monte recalls how the prisoners were described as “scum” and “vagabonds”, pictured in a delirious flashback of a dirt-stained Boyse train hopping. For a science fiction film set in space, with a decidedly clinical focus (Dr. Dibs not only works on reproduction, but monitors vital signs and administers drugs), there is a palpable sense of dirt and decay – a kind of deterioration which approximates the exploitation of these prisoners, the forced duration that exceeds human timelines. From the outside, the spaceship resembles a floating shipping container. Inside, fluids (soap, blood, cum, milk) leak and cryogenic vapour escapes into the corridor. The medical equipment looks outdated and at times DIY, while Dr. Dibs is shown administering a needle in a ragged, oversized hoodie. There is also a dirtiness to the film’s superb score and sound design (led by Denis regular Stuart A. Staples of Tindersticks), in the way that music and the background ambience of the spaceship (a continuous radiating hum) fold into and mingle with the materiality of sound effects, such as the bubble and gurgle of a water-recycling system or the hiss of cryogenic vapour escaping from the chamber. On the television screen, an image of someone entering the ocean begins to glitch. A passing forest, shot through a train window, becomes an abstract blur of grey shifting lines. Near the end of the film, Monte and Willow come across an identical spaceship, dark and overrun with dogs, some rabid, some dead.
Monte and Willow’s spaceship is frequently cast in blue and red light. This colour palette renders all the more striking the yellow glow of the black hole, and the thin horizontal band of light which expands to fill the film’s closing screen. These design elements stem from Denis’s collaboration with Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, with whom she made a short film, ‘Contact’, in 2014. But the film’s lasting image for me is not yellow, but red. After the trauma of giving birth to Willow (a notable ellipsis within the film), and the spaceship reaches its purported destination, Boyse hijacks the shuttle towards the black hole. As she hurtles through a molecular cloud, the film cuts between a dizzying whirl of light, and the pulling, distorting, and deformation of Boyse’s face. Blood seeps out, her helmet filling up with red. She is dying, but this is a moment of exhilarating movement – one that not only recalls the earlier flashback of Boyse train hopping, but an image from Denis’s film L’Intrus (2004) of Béatrice Dalle whipping past on a dog sled. For philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, with whom Denis has a long-standing dialogue, the image of the dog sled ride encapsulates the fact that “all the movement of the film, all its kinetics, is about passage.”v L’Intrus centres on the breaching of borders, both bodily and geographical, following its protagonist across countries and oceans as he pursues a black-market heart transplant and his long-lost son. In contrast, although it takes place on a moving spaceship, High Life presents few images outside its confines, instead emphasising the restricted movement of its prisoners. In breaching these restrictions, and provoking a kinetic transformation of the screen and the body at its centre, Boyse’s escape – more than any literal boundary-crossing by Monte and Willow – presents such a passage. By giving prominence to Boyse’s fatal passage after the trauma of rape and forced insemination, High Life recasts its earlier portrayal of her violated womb. If Boyse’s body is a site of worlding, it is a fiercely self-destructive one. As a film so concerned with exploitation in the name of planetary and species survival, it is fitting that High Life gives us this image. In a world where the future is no longer guaranteed, control over bodies – whether through incarceration or reproduction – is no way out.
i Adriana Cavarero, For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 169. ii Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 124. iii Thank you to critic and film historian Pamela Hutchinson for identifying the clips. Read her essay on In the Land of the Headhunters: “Filmmakers and indigenous people were collaborating on hybrid features years before nanook of the north,” Sight and Sound 24(4), 2014, 53. iv Denis’s exploration of France’s colonial legacy is shaped by her personal experience growing up in West Africa, where her father was a French colonial administrator. See her interview with Barry Jenkins, “Claire Denis Talks to Barry Jenkins About Director Anxiety and Expectations,” The New York Times, 16 April, 2019. v Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Intruder According to Claire Denis,” in The Films of Claire Denis: Intimacy on the Border (London and New York: IB Tauris, 2014).
Hannah Paveck is a PhD Candidate in Film Studies at King’s College London. Her doctoral project draws on the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy to examine sound and listening in contemporary global art cinema.
