Critic Reviews

With an achievement of this calibre it’s hard to resist hyperbole: High Life contains the single greatest one-person sex scene in the history of cinema.

High Life offers an uncompromising mind-bender of a deep space journey through destructive desire, faith, trust and the instincts for good and bad that make us merely human.

By twisting around preconceptions of what an outer-space epic should be, French auteur Claire Denis returns to the fertile ground of her Trouble Every Day era, using genre to dig beneath themes that others would only treat as skin-deep.

The crew’s suffering is bleak and oppressive, but Denis invites us to witness it so that we truly understand the power of Monte’s conviction in his improvised mission...and Denis is so emotionally in tune with what that might feel like it becomes overwhelming.

What Denis’ film is concerned with is the visceral bodily experience and the claustrophobia of living in the middle of the infinite. If outer space is a cold and vast external of nothingness, then there is also an interior space of bodies, living, writhing, and fluid.

With its brutal violence, explicit sex, and up-close views of blood, sweat, urine, and semen, it is proudly an R-rated film, verging on NC-17—though the X-rating, which was discontinued by the MPAA almost 30 years ago, might feel more appropriate.

The gravitational pull of sex, death and the void is palpable.

As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film was over.

The lure of intense mystery that beguiles you into trying to solve it again and again; the transference of an intoxication that makes you feel physically different afterwards. It sounds hyperbolic to describe art as having such power, but surely the reason we care about art is a belief that such power exists. High Life is too layered, too ambiguous, too potent to be about any one thing.

For all its body horrors and apocalyptic conclusions, High Life is one of Denis’s most loving and tender creations.